diG Jamaica sat down with Raquel Seville, the CEO of B.I. Brainz (Caribbean), to get more insight into what Business Intelligence is. This is a growing field in Jamaica heavily utilized by companies like Digicel.
“Business Intelligence takes the guess work out of decision making. BETTER DECISIONS = BETTER QUALITY PRODUCTS AND SERVICES.” – Raquel Seville
It’s a fancy way of referring to the goal of getting actionable insights from company data. Essentially, the data should support some kind of decision making in the end. This type of intelligence helps persons to make decisions that are supported by fact and not fiction. Would you rather make an informed decision based on hard figures or one that is based on feeling?
Making decisions based on actual findings would effectively allow manufacturers to improve their marketing agendas and make better more useful and cost effective products. A company of note mentioned by Raquel was Digicel.
“A lot of the initiatives that companies are able to push is due to analysis of customer trends and target customers. This impacts how you market to them and how to appeal to a certain demographic.” – Raquel Seville
Business Intelligence tools vary widely and as such have a very broad spectrum. There are data specific tools , process specific tools , database repository tools and finally presentation tools. Presentation tools remain the most popular aspect of business intelligence. This may be due to it being used to explain trends to stakeholders.
Examples of BI Tools:
- Data Specific Tools – This uses extraction transformed load tools (ETL) Informatica
- Database Tools – Microsoft, Oracle, MySQL & Hadoo (which is designed for big data, more unstructured).
- Presentation Tools – PowerBI, TaBleau , SAP BI tools, Qlik