The essence of business intelligence is that it turns data into information. Moreover, business intelligence delivers the right information to the right people at the right time.

The rapid pace of today’s business environment has made business intelligence (BI) systems indispensable to an organisation’s success. BI systems turn a company's raw data into useable information that can help management identify important trends, analyse customer behaviour and make intelligent business decisions quickly. Over the past few years, business intelligence systems have been used to understand and address back office needs such as efficiency and productivity. Now organisations are increasingly using BI to analyse customer behaviour, drive profitability, understand market trends and search for new opportunities. BI’s reach is enterprise-wide and roles other than management can benefit from timely delivery of information by providing decision support.

BI relies on an effective data repository, without which organisations cannot extract the data required for information analysis in time to facilitate expedient decision-making. With a data repository in place, BI applications will deliver information that can be used to drive three types of activity. These are reporting, query and analysis and performance management. Different roles in the business will determine what mix of these is required. For example, a senior manager’s prime BI needs may be served by alerts, scorecards and dashboards of KPIs with some scheduled management reports. Whereas a business analyst may want to carry out ad-hoc query and analysis and refer to monthly static reports that are relevant to their own area of the business.

Itex understands that businesses need to make intelligent decisions based on their incoming business data – and do it quickly. Simply put, the ability to turn raw data into useful information in a timely manner can add substantial value to an organisation’s bottom line.