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Business intelligence is a top technology initiative today for most organizations.

The ability to immediately access data pertaining to finance and cost management, operational performance, and sales and marketing trends can improve a company’s efficiency and give it a competitive edge. Ultimately, effective business intelligence can boost a company’s bottom line.

“One of the biggest driving factors for business intelligence is the need to access information quickly to make fast decisions based on current market trends,” says Dave Winkler, business intelligence practice leader at Brown Smith Wallace LLC. “Organizations need to turn all of the data they’re collecting into usable information.”

Smart Business spoke with Winkler about how companies can use business intelligence to harness their data to improve sales, cut costs and improve efficiency.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) includes the skills, processes, technologies, applications and practices that help support decision-making. It’s a combination of applications and business processes that put critical information into the hands of business users so they can do their jobs more effectively and make faster, better decisions.

BI goes beyond standard weekly or monthly reporting on activities taking place within an organization to convert data into usable information for faster decision-making. Systems implemented in a BI initiative today typically provide key measurement criteria for managing your business more closely so you can act immediately when you see positive or negative trends.

How can business intelligence improve a company’s efficiency?

In the past, BI was regarded as a tool for top-level executives, but this is no longer the case. More businesses are immersing their entire organizations in BI so that employees at all levels can harness the power of information to perform their jobs more efficiently. This can translate into increasing sales, reducing downtime, improving operational effectiveness, cutting costs and improving the bottom line.

It is also a tool that can help streamline processes. Now more than ever, businesses are seeking ways to cut the fat out of their organizations so they can compete in this tough economy and BI is a key tool that can help in doing this. Further, BI with scorecards can be implemented within work groups or departments to measure individual/group performance.