Business information is anything that holds meaning, value or significance to a business. This could include reports, dashboards, metrics, regulatory reporting and web pages.
The major focuses on how raw data is gathered, stored, analyzed and distilled into strategic information for businesses to effectively support their operations. Well managed business information can prevent unseen profit leakage, administrative costs, IT project budget and timeline blow outs and risky operational outcomes.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) describes processes and technologies that enable companies to gain insights from their data. It is a broad term that encompasses both descriptive and predictive analytics.
BI tools help businesses identify important trends and patterns that can support strategic decision-making. They provide a visual interface to allow users to explore and analyze data from across multiple sources, including big data and real-time streaming data.
The best BI tools are secure, compliant and globally available, and they enable teams to access and analyze information quickly. They are also easy to use and support collaboration, including shared dashboards and data visualization.
Choosing the right BI solution for your organization depends on the specific needs of different stakeholders. Identify a priority use case and work with the teams that will be most impacted. This will ensure buy-in and accelerate your business intelligence initiatives. It is critical that the BI solution you choose balances governance and autonomy in report creation so that IT can manage data quality, security and compliance while giving business users the freedom to make fast decisions from their desktop.
Business Analytics
Business analytics combines skills and technologies to investigate historical business data, identify trends and predict future outcomes. It allows organizations to improve operational efficiencies, better understand customers, project revenue, and glean insights to guide decision-making.
For example, if your co-op’s sales of blue feather earrings spike in Utah this month, business intelligence would help you know that the market is interested in your product. But predictive analytics takes this further by identifying the likelihood that a specific outcome will occur, which allows you to plan accordingly.
To be successful, business analytics requires leadership buy-in and experts to manage the process. It also depends on an appropriate volume of quality data and access to tools for analysis, data visualization and modeling. For the best results, BI should be used as an ongoing tool to support strategies already in place. That way, everyone can have access to relevant and timely information to make the best decisions possible.
Business Information Systems
Business information systems are the supporting networks that make data useful to managerial and executive decision-making. They are a key part of any large business and are widely used in a modern world characterized by strategic procurement, worldwide outsourcing and physically distributed operational environments.
Business intelligence systems provide real-time data to help businesses analyze and understand their operations. These systems are used by a variety of industries to track inventory levels, sales and more. This information is then analyzed and used to improve productivity and efficiency.
A business information system is any collection of documents or records that fit the definition of having meaning, value or significance to a particular business. This includes reports, spreadsheets, metrics, regulatory reporting and even collections of data sources. If business information is not managed well, it can undermine business growth and profit, create hidden costs in administrative expenses and put the company into legal or reputational risk without anyone knowing it.
Information Management
IM deals with the level and scope of an organisation’s governance over its information systems and services, including both physical (paper-based) and digital information assets. It also includes information storage and how it is accessed.
The IM ‘domain’ has evolved from a number of disciplines that have traditionally had an interest in the acquisition, organization and maintenance of documents, such as archives, records management, library science and information work. It is a broad and varied field, and as such, it is difficult to define in the same way that IT-related fields have been defined.
Successful information management projects should be based on clear strategic objectives, rather than technology solutions. This requires that the ‘problems and opportunities’ to be articulated clearly, and these should not be restricted to the information systems itself. It will involve identifying improvement areas across the business, and developing appropriate information processing activities that can address these. It should also include the development of a plan to mitigate risks. more