Business Intelligence Software Development Overview, Benefits, Types, Features, Choosing the Right Vendor, Cost to Develop. Data is the most crucial part of any business in today’s digital world.
While companies are creating massive volumes of data, it is essential to drive meaningful insights from this data and make informed business decisions. But how can a business do that?
The answer is quite simple: an organization can invest in business intelligence software development to achieve just that.
BI software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to extract, analyze, and interpret large amounts of data to uncover insights and drive strategic decision-making.
To help you out, we will explore what Business Intelligence (BI) software is, the benefits and types of BI software, along with how it can help businesses gain a competitive advantage.
What is Business Intelligence Software?
Business Intelligence (BI) software refers to the type of application program that is used to collect, retrieve, process, transform, and report large amounts of data from internal and external systems. It helps businesses in making informed decisions.
It is a set of practices and technologies used to transform data into actionable visualizations and reports. Put simply, BI software ingests business data and presents it in interactive dashboards, reports, charts, and graphs.
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Using BI software, users can access historical, third-party, semi-structured, unstructured, in-house, and current data to analyze all the information and gain insights into the business performance.
Benefits of Business Intelligence Software Development
Now that we have a better understanding of what business intelligence software is, let’s dive into the benefits it can offer to a business.
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Competitive Analysis
Business intelligence software gives a business competitive advantage in the market by allowing them to make quick yet insightful decisions based on in-depth market data analysis.
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Valuable Business Insights
As BI software continues to collect and analyze data, it helps businesses in attaining actionable insights through reports on different data sets including operation processes, expenses, financial, sales, and customer services.
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Visualize Important Information
Manually interpreting operational reports can be difficult and time-consuming for an organization. However, by using business intelligence software, organizations get data visualization capabilities that allow them to create easy-to-understand and actionable reports.
These reports can then be used by the organization to recognize opportunities and act on key metrics.
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Increased Operational Efficiency
One of the lesser-known benefits of business intelligence software is the ability to reduce the operational and administrative workload by automating tasks like data organization, removing redundant data, and other repetitive tasks, hence increasing productivity.
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Improved ROI
Increasing the return on investment is a major concern for most businesses. With BI tools, discrepancies, errors, and inefficiencies can be analyzed from enormous volumes of data. It not only helps in expanding the profit margins but also offers future sales insights and analyzes future spending patterns.
Types of Business Intelligence Software Development
The general business intelligence software Development categories are as follows:
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Reporting and Querying:
Reporting and querying software allows businesses to collect, sort, summarize, report, and run queries on data. The data here can be accessed from disparate sources including spreadsheets, databases, and data warehouses to be analyzed.
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This BI software allows users to quickly generate reports using pre-designed templates that are often customizable. It allows users to change layouts, add or remove fields, modify formatting, etc. to match their needs.
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Ad hoc Analysis:
Ad hoc analysis software is designed to answer specific business questions using data collected from the company. It allows stakeholders to analyze an event and create actionable steps based on the reports to improve their overall performance.
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Online analytical processing (OLAP):
OLAP is BI software using which businesses can analyze data from different points of view. Moreover, multidimensional analytical queries can be answered using OLAP.
Put simply, OLAP BI software combines and divides data into different categories to offer actionable insights for strategic planning.
Using OLAP software comes with multiple benefits like faster decision-making, integrated data view, and non-technical support for users.
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Digital dashboards:
A digital dashboard refers to business intelligence software that allows users to visualize their KPIs in an easy-to-understand format. A business can track, analyze, and report different data metrics and KPIs.
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It is used in conjunction with multiple data sets, reducing the need to login into different platforms to create and run data analytics.
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Data mining:
Data mining software is used to extract and discover trends and patterns in large data sets. It can be used by businesses to learn about customers' interests, spam filtering, fraud detection, and so much more.
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It provides database analysis for knowledge discovery by extracting information from data sets. Apart from this, data mining software also helps businesses in data pre-processing, database management, complexity analysis, post-processing discovery, model and inference considerations, visualization, etc.
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Business Activity Monitoring
It is software that helps in monitoring business processes and technologies that allows critical performance analysis and situation awareness based on real-time data.
The main benefits of using business activity monitoring are identifying problem areas, making informed decisions, and making businesses ready to take advantage of upcoming opportunities.
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Features to Consider Business Intelligence Software Development
Before investing in the development of business intelligence software you must consider the following features:
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Data Cleansing
It helps in detecting and removing/correcting inaccurate or corrupted records from the database. Data cleansing on its own refers to identifying irrelevant or incomplete data and then modifying, replacing, or deleting coarse data.
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Data Ingestion
It is the process of obtaining large assorted data sets from multiple sources and importing them into cloud storage to be analyzed. Data can either be ingested in batches or in real time depending on the business requirements.
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Data Management
It refers to the practice of gathering, sorting, and analyzing data to support efficient and productive decision-making. The goal of a data management tool in business intelligence software is to help companies optimize their data to be used for making informed decisions and increasing profitability.
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Analytics
Data analytics refers to the systematic analysis of data. Analytics is used for the interpretation, discovery, and analysis of data patterns to improve business performance.
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Security
It is an essential part of any business software as it helps in maintaining the integrity, confidentiality, and availability of valuable data to reduce the chances of data exploitation.
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Reporting and Visualization
The business intelligence software must have an interactive dashboard with customizable visualizations to facilitate clear and concise reporting of different business performance data.
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Other General Features
Apart from the above-mentioned features, you should also consider whether you want the BI software to have on-premise, cloud, or hybrid deployment, its personal and team workspace, and most importantly its way to collaborate and share analytics results.
Business Intelligence Software Development Cost
The Business intelligence software development cost can be anywhere from $10,000 to $300,000. The estimated cost of development depends on the features, complexity, performance, scalability, flexibility, and most importantly the skills of the development team you are about to hire.
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And if you are looking for experienced developers with relevant experience in business intelligence software development, then you can get in touch with Decipher Zone Technologies to acquire customized development costs depending on your requirements.
FAQs
What is Business Intelligence software?
BI software refers to an application program used to collect, retrieve, process, transform, and report large amounts of data from internal and external systems.
What does business intelligence software do?
BI software ingests business data and presents it in interactive dashboards, reports, charts, and graphs to help companies make informed business decisions.
What are the different types of Business Intelligence software?
Business Intelligence software can be divided into the following types:
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Reporting and Querying
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Ad hoc Analysis
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Online analytical processing (OLAP)
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Digital dashboards
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Data mining
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Business Activity Monitoring