Franz Dill over at the emerging technologies blog Eponymous Pickle pointed out an interesting article in Information Week on business intelligence technologies.
Business intelligence systems provide information on the history, current status or future projections of an organization. Basically, anything that generates data that informs decision making could be considered a business intelligence system.
The article points out 4 technologies that are improving business intelligence systems:
1. predictive analytics: the ability to do better business forecasting using a mix of data and information sources and analytical software.
2. real-time business monitoring: the ability to better understand what is happening right now with the key performance factors of a business.
3. in-memory processing of information: this is a bit geeky, but in-memory processing refers to ability to store and process lots of data and information at one time. In-memory processing is required to do real-time analytics on large data sets.
4. Cloud delivery of business intelligence: the use of cloud and software as service delivery methods increases business intelligence deployment speed and flexibility.
Business intelligence systems provide insights on customers and business operations, improve decision making and reduce risk. These systems are augmenting and replacing "seat of the pants" management techniques and becoming increasingly popular with small businesses.
Great points - the key is that business intelligence is migratrating from being just a solution for Fortune 500. For example, inventory optimization is now feasible for users of QuickBooks with our flagship software Phitch. To make this transition to small business - BI must be easy to use and affordable. These four technologies are making BI powerful, easy to use, and affordable.
Posted by: John Krech | August 31, 2009 at 11:42 AM
Thanks for these great tips to keep entrepreneurs ahead of the game and up to date with the latest technology!
Posted by: Team The Rise To The Top | August 31, 2009 at 08:07 PM
In reply to John Krech. Do you want to see the bleeding edge of Business Intelligence for Small Business owners and managers who use QuickBooks and Excel?
Check it out. http://www.qvinci.com
Qvinci aggregates QuickBooks financial data with Operational data from Excel into a sinlge easy to use graphical dashboard. It uses forward looking tools for predictive analysis. It works real-time with a QuickBooks company file to provide useful information to an owner now. This Saas just released to the public is the desktop version.
Posted by: Mark Decker | September 29, 2009 at 08:10 AM
Thanks for the article on business intelligence, this is very useful especially now that we are on an economic crisis.
Posted by: Small Business Bookkeeping | March 06, 2010 at 06:18 AM