Overview of Business Intelligence Tools and their Functions

The booming business market calls for smart decisions to keep in check the level of competition by making smart business decisions. Business Intelligence allows you to do the same. It is the process of gathering all the data that an organization garners from all its activities. After all the data is gathered, it is then turned into visual data for better analysis and finally, this analysis provides the business with actionable business insights that eventually allow a representative with smarter business development decisions for better performance of the business altogether. ‘What is the need for business intelligence?’ one might ask, considering the conventional way of practicing business activities and exercising business decisions. Well, in this constantly changing environment where everything is going digitized, every organization be it an established player or a budding one, should buck up and accept the challenge of the current scenario. To perform BI activities every organization looks for professionals who’ve mastered the knowledge of Business Intelligence Tools and have faced the challenges in real-time by learning about how to tackle them. Let’s take a look at some of these tools so that we can understand what they are and why we need professionals in this particular field.

• Tableau: It’s a BI tool that allows a professional to distinguish complex trend patterns so that they can convert them into innovative business insights that’ll help their clients to formulate adequate decisions. Creating dashboards in Tableau is not much of a technical approach as it is available on almost all devices to connect with more and more users. The dashboards can be implemented by simply using drag-and-drop fields.

Some of the features that make it distinguishable from others are:

1. It supports apt visualization:

Tableau allows professionals to select data and switch between visualizations so that they can come up with the best visual approach for the data.

1. Tableau gives users different ways to answer questions when they’re going through the data visualizations. This enhances the process of discovering particular data.
2. Tableau offers a variety of implementing and consulting services for enterprise-level deployment.
3. Tableau offers its end-users to create customized formulas that are not available on most of the tools.
4. Tableau allows the number of native connectors (individuals) to easily pull, cleanse, and correlate data from any source they can score without having to create any custom code.

• Informatica: Informatica is a data integration tool that is based on the Extract, Transform, and Load (ETL) model, which means it covers the extraction of data from different sources and then transforms it into a structure that can be used for report analysis.

Some of the features that make it a highly useful tool are:

1. It gathers all the data from all the possible sources a business is associated with and then loads it into the targeted sources where the data is supposed to be.
2. Informatica’s ETL structure helps it to stand as a tool that is capable of handling a huge amount of data.
3. Along with handling a huge quantity of data, Informatica also provides services like data integration and software for a variety of industries like telecommunication, healthcare, finance, and insurance.
4. Even though it has a high-performance nature, Informatica is a simple tool when it comes to developing, maintaining, and administering it.

These features make Informatica more beneficial than the conventional ETL process. 

• Microsoft Business Intelligence (MSBI): Microsoft Business Intelligence is one of the top-rated business intelligence and data mining tools. Below are some features that make it distinguishable in the market.

1. Microsoft Business Intelligence allows its user to create interactive dashboards and scoreboards so that the visual output is having more of a creative touch than a dry one.
2. Microsoft Business Intelligence as a tool has a well-integrated structure that allows it to create outputs that are both snappy and exact.
3. It promotes optimized solutions for business intelligence queries.
4. Uses visual studio with structure query language or SQL servers. This in turn allows businesses to access the most accurate information so that they can come up with improved superior decisions every time they use it.

As a BI tool, Microsoft Business Intelligence is categorized into three services, namely:

1. SQL Server Integrated Services (SSIS)

As an SSIS Microsoft business intelligence is a platform for creating high-end performances and workflow solutions.

2. SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS)

As an SSAS Microsoft business intelligence is a platform for converting dimensional data into a multi-dimensional data model.

3. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS)

Finally, as an SSRS, Microsoft Business Intelligence acts as an enterprise reporting platform that supports both dimensional and multi-dimensional data. As of reporting, it supports both traditional and interactive data that are delivered over the web.