# Complete Guide to Business Intelligence (BI) > Complete Business Intelligence Guide: what BI is, how it differs from analytics, and how to structure data for reliable reports. Source: https://www.erathos.com/en/blog/business-intelligence-bi Em português: https://www.erathos.com/blog/business-intelligence-bi Published: 2022-09-23 Category: Business Intelligence & Analytics ![Business Intelligence architecture with data, transformation, and visualization layers](https://cms-media.erathos.com/qjcZYTZrxXHgkLIDO2XMQA2GgE-1.png) Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of processes combined with strategic tools to facilitate the visualization of your business data and make the decision-making process increasingly focused on the actual landscape of the market, your customers, your performance, and the organization itself. Knowing how to leverage your data is revolutionary for businesses in all segments, and in this blog, we will show you why. ## Where do we see BI in practice? Think of your favorite brands, the entertainment you consume, and the events you attend. What do they have in common to help make your experience excellent? For every outstanding brand in the market today, we see clear examples of the applied use of business intelligence, from marketing strategies to how they communicate, and in many cases, even in the products and services offered. Much of what is planned for each part of a business is designed to achieve the best possible performance, both in terms of target audience satisfaction and financial results. A well-known business case is the use of data and business intelligence in the production of series and the strategy of [Netflix](https://www.tecmundo.com.br/internet/131307-analise-dados-netflix-construiu-sucesso-empresa.htm), a company with a presence in over 190 countries and a pioneer in its segment. Another is the use of data to create unique and memorable experiences for the audience at [Rock in Rio 2022](https://scc10.com.br/colunistas/sendy-luz/rock-in-rio-investe-metaverso/), or even in optimizing athlete performance and professional team negotiation strategies for sports events. In every industry, department, and segment, it is crucial to make smart decisions based on business data, and throughout this article, we will show you how BI helps in building [data-driven companies](https://erathos.com/blog/a-sua-empresa-e-data-driven/). ## What are the goals of BI? The term Business Intelligence does not refer to a single strategy or a cookie-cutter recipe to boost sales, but is used to encompass a set of processes, methods, and tools that help guide smarter business decisions, as the name suggests. There are several advantages to implementing BI, including closing the gap between companies, their customers, and the market, assisting in the delivery of increasingly personalized solutions, and helping to create efficient, agile, and smart processes. For this reason, the use of BI can be based on a few objectives: ### 1) Analyze the company scenario Knowing how to use data offers a realistic and integrated view of the organization's status, enabling more realistic insights into how each department is operating internally, how commercial and market relationships are going, and generating powerful insights based on real information. Having a well-equipped BI infrastructure helps make this a reality, transforming your company's landscape forever. ### 2) Optimize processes and build action plans How many hours does your company lose with manual reporting in each department, or in strategic meetings to discuss siloed information? A BI infrastructure can save a lot of precious time, allowing your employees to focus on more critical and strategic activities for the business. Additionally, based on insights from each area, you can understand where the main bottlenecks are and map out realistic action plans to address them, such as implementing new processes or tools to improve performance. ### 3) Support key decision-making Being data-driven is about knowing how to use data, and this is especially true in decision-making. It is vital to have fast, accurate access to data on what is happening in each department when deciding where to allocate resources, which areas need hiring, where to invest in improvements, and even to understand employee and customer satisfaction and journeys. Data brings what is needed to support decisions. This prevents spending on resources that are less strategic or inefficient in the long run. Want to understand where your company is falling short with BI? We have an article about it [here](https://erathos.com/blog/business-intelligence-voce-esta-perdendo-dinheiro/). ## How BI transforms businesses Okay... We've talked about several benefits and changes that BI brings, but in practice, how does it transform businesses? In practice, BI saves the time that decision-makers would spend doing calculations, updating numbers, and collecting department data, automating many of these pipelines and delivering them ready-to-use so that the focus is truly on strategic decision-making. For businesses, this is transformative, as it allows all relationships to flow more freely: you can improve customer relationships, bring more innovation to products, understand the best HR actions in employee journeys, implement training where necessary, have more efficient inventory control, and find issues before they cause serious losses. ## Why hire BI professionals? Currently, to build a company with Business Intelligence that is truly effective, and not just on paper, you need a complete data team. The BI professional today, in most companies, ends up playing the role of a business analyst, as someone who simply builds dashboards in visualization tools. This is important, but you also need to implement a data engineering infrastructure to ensure better results. With this, BI professionals have the real power to guide the necessary transformation within companies to make them more data-driven. They are not just "the dashboard people," but experts who understand where to focus energy, and what steps and technologies are required to have an operation focused on the results your company wants to achieve. However, hiring new professionals to implement a BI stack can be an extremely high investment and requires careful planning to avoid inefficiencies and errors. That's why there are [companies](http://erathos.com) that can help by outsourcing the data and BI team. ## What is BI as a Service? Understanding the real business landscape is crucial to guiding the best business strategies and scaling higher. The tools, technologies, processes, and professionals involved in this are a major investment because, as mentioned above, BI is not just software or a single hire, but involves a stack of tools, processes, infrastructure, and technologies. This all comes at a high cost for businesses and can take a long time to implement internally. For this reason, a service emerged in the market that offers the entire BI infrastructure as an outsourced model to help implement and execute what is needed, bringing results in less time. This partner company already knows best practices, has a team of specialists at your disposal, and already has all the tools required to deliver this service. Want to know more about BI as a Service? We have an [exclusive blog post](https://erathos.com/blog/business-intelligence-como-um-servico-blass-e-pra-voce/) explaining this service. ## Conclusion Business Intelligence (BI) is a set of tools, processes, infrastructure, and technology that enables a company's data to be used to generate insights and support more agile and accurate decisions. It is an implementation that brings challenges and investments, but it transforms the culture and results of companies in a revolutionary way. Any company that wants to leverage its results and scale fast needs to think seriously about its data maturity and how to improve decision-making. To achieve this, having a data strategy is highly important, whether by building an internal data team or outsourcing this service (BI as a Service). Want to know more about how to leverage your data and revolutionize your business starting now? Reach out and contact Erathos!