What is business intelligence (BI)?
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of using the power of people and technologies to collect and analyze data to be used by organizations in their strategic and daily decision-making processes.
Google Cloud's Looker is a business intelligence tool that offers a unified view of your company’s data.
Business intelligence overview
Typically, the business intelligence process involves gathering company data into a data warehouse or other repository and using a specially designed tool to analyze the data. For example, a company might look at customer online shopping habits, operational costs, or regional sales information.
The tools that comprise a business intelligence solution fall into three categories:
- On-premises: These run on your organization’s infrastructure and are commonly used with traditional data warehouses.
- Open source: These tools are cost effective, but often require deep technical knowledge and manual coding to manage effectively.
- Cloud-based: Cloud-based business intelligence tools excel at handling streaming data and large volumes of data. They reduce overhead because the cloud vendor manages the underlying infrastructure and environment.
Business intelligence use cases
Modern BI goes beyond static reporting by integrating with the broader data-to-AI lifecycle. Here is how organizations apply BI using Google Cloud:
Predictive analytics & forecasting
Organizations use BI to move from descriptive to predictive insights. By utilizing BigQuery, Google’s autonomous data-to-AI platform, teams can automate the data lifecycle from ingestion to generating AI-driven forecasts for sales or customer churn.
Unified data governance
Large enterprises often struggle with data quality across disparate systems. Using Dataplex Universal Catalog allows data stewards to maintain consistent semantics and governance for both data and AI agents, ensuring BI reports are based on trusted data.
Real-time operational analytics
Companies analyze real-time streaming data from stock markets or IoT sensors. With Serverless Spark (Dataproc), engineers can submit Spark jobs with a single command, allowing the organization to focus on insights rather than managing clusters.
Open data lakehouse architectures
To maintain flexibility, organizations use BI tools that work across open storage formats. BigLake allows teams to query data in formats like Apache Iceberg with full interoperability across their data warehouse and open-source engines.
What are the benefits of business intelligence?
Use data to better understand business performance
Use data to better understand business performance
A modern BI tool can help organizations understand what happened, why it happened, and what needs to happen to optimize their operations better.
Take actionable steps in response to key performance indicators
Take actionable steps in response to key performance indicators
Analyzed data can uncover important patterns in sales, customer service, production, and security to inform short- and long-term performance.
Find opportunities for new business lines
Find opportunities for new business lines
BI allows companies to adapt quickly to the changing business landscape by defining new product lines and optimizing sales channels.
Why is business intelligence important?
Companies with the goal of increasing their efficiency in making fact-based decisions understand the importance of business intelligence. It uncovers important patterns and trends within business data, delivering a deep view of consumer behavior and internal productivity. The quality and location of data are critical factors:
- Data quality: Bad data results in bad business intelligence. To maintain quality data, companies need to take steps to clean and normalize the data regularly.
- Critical data buried in different systems: When critical data is siloed, your business intelligence is incomplete. Solutions like Dataplex Universal Catalog help provide unified governance to break down these silos.
- Lack of expertise: Using BI tools can require significant expertise. Google Cloud addresses this by allowing developers to use familiar tools, such as BigQuery Studio notebooks, to manage the data lifecycle.
Business intelligence tools
A business intelligence solution on Google Cloud helps your organization take advantage of all your data to support day-to-day decision-making.
BigQueryServerless, highly scalable, and cost-effective cloud autonomous data-to-AI platform designed for business agility.
LookerCloud-native platform for enterprise business intelligence, data applications, and embedded analytics.
Serverless Spark (Dataproc)Allows for fast data processing and application development without the need to manage clusters.
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