What BI actually is

Business intelligence sounds bigger than it is. Strip away the software and it comes down to one idea: a business already writes down what happens, and BI turns those records into answers someone can act on.

Take a small chain of three cafés. Every time someone buys a coffee, the till records a line: what was sold, when, where and for how much. By the end of a month there are tens of thousands of lines. Nobody can read them. But the owner still has questions:

• Which café is growing and which is slipping?
• What sells in the morning and what sells after lunch?
• Did the new menu make any difference?

BI is the work of getting from that pile of lines to those answers.

The four steps

Almost every BI project, small or large, follows the same path.

1. Collect. Bring the records together from wherever they live: the till, the accounts, a spreadsheet someone keeps by hand.
2. Shape. Tidy them so they can be combined. Dates in one format, the same product spelled one way, no totals mixed in with the data.
3. Measure. Decide what the numbers mean. Is “sales” before or after tax? Does a refund count?
4. Show. Put the answer in front of the person who needs it, in a form they can read in seconds.

Most beginners start at step four because charts are the visible part. Most of the real work, and most of the mistakes, sit in steps two and three.

What BI is not

It is not a tool. Power BI, Tableau and Excel are tools. You can do good BI in a spreadsheet and bad BI in expensive software.

It is not decoration. A page full of colourful charts that nobody acts on is not intelligence. It is wallpaper.

It is not prediction. BI mainly tells you what happened and what is happening. Forecasting and AI build on top of it, and they are only as good as the records underneath.

The one-sentence test

Before building or asking for any report, finish this sentence:

Because of this report, someone will decide something.

“Because of this report, the owner will decide which café needs an extra person on Saturdays” passes. “Because of this report, management will have visibility” does not. If you cannot name the person and the decision, the report is not ready to be built.

Try it

Think of one report you see regularly at work, or one you wish you had. Write the one-sentence test for it. If the sentence comes easily, note it down; you will use it again in the last episode. If it does not, that tells you something useful about the report.

Next, we look at the raw material itself: rows, columns and tables.