What is business intelligence?

- In this first video, I'd like to talk a little about what Business Intelligence is and how it can benefit you and others particularly using SharePoint. Business Intelligence refers to the tools and processes for transforming raw data into meaningful business information. It's not about collecting or collaborating on information. It's about using information that has already been collected to answer the questions you have so you can do your job better. Business Intelligence lets you answer specific questions like which specific product in a category sold the most? What time of year did it sell the most? What else did people buy when they bought the product? If I remove the months where we had promotions, what's the percentage difference in sales of that product? What Microsoft has done with Excel 2013 and SharePoint 2013, is make it faster and easier for the average business user to answer questions like these.

Before, if you wanted to create a dashboard for instance, you'd have to make a request from your IT department. IT would use its tools and knowledge to create a dashboard that used large data sets and post it on SharePoint where you and others could access it. Anytime someone wanted a different dashboard, they'd have to make another request. Now if you want a report, you can just create it in Excel. A tool that most business users are familiar with. You can connect to the those large data sets yourself and create your dashboard.

Then share your workbook on SharePoint where you and others can use it. Not only that, but other people in your organization can make copies of your workbook with all your charts and graphs and easily modify it to create their own dashboards. So, with Excel 2013 and SharePoint 2013, IT disappears as the middleman. You have self service Business Intelligence.