Business intelligence meaning: what is BI?

Every program in your company stores data: the CRM about customers, the accounting program about revenue, the ticket system about customer questions. Every program also has its own reports. The problem starts when you have a question that spans several programs, such as: which customers bring in a lot of revenue but also take up a lot of support time?

Business intelligence, or BI, is the answer to that question. A BI tool pulls data together from several sources, puts it in one model and shows it as a chart, table or dashboard. That way, combining figures stops being manual work in a spreadsheet.

The steps are the same with every BI solution. You connect the sources, often through an API or a standard connection. You clean the data and define exactly what a customer, an order or a worked hour is. You build reports around the KPIs that matter. And you agree who looks at them and when. The third step is the most important: a report without a question goes unread.

For an SME, BI is not always needed. If your company has one main program, its own reports are often enough. BI pays off when you regularly combine figures from several programs by hand, or when you often argue about which number is right. Then one shared source is the gain.

Poor data gives a poor report, however nice the screen. That is why the set-up of the source programs matters more than the BI tool. With Zoho, the BI app is called Zoho Analytics. In a Zoho set-up we first fix which data sits where, and only then look at which reports you need. An overview of all apps is on our Zoho page.