By Tiaan Rossouw – In order to successfully plan future business strategies and identify areas that need improvement in their operations, organisations need to analyse and interpret data and extract relevant information from it, says Tiaan Rossouw, Analytics Services Lead at Intervate, a T-Systems company.

In fact, the effective use of business intelligence (BI) and analytics could mean the difference between companies that succeed and ones that fail, as this information is key to get ahead of the competition.

In most cases, large amounts of enterprise data are stored across servers, databases, spreadsheets and lately, somewhere in the cloud, and BI solutions can be used to extract this data directly from the data source and produce accurate reports and dashboards.

Fortunately, in this day and age, with everything being stored in electronic format, it has become significantly easier to extract business-critical data. As soon as you access data stores and extract the relevant information, you can analyse what is going on inside an organisation.

BI can be seen as a subset of data analytics. Data analytics refers to the process of analysing raw data to make conclusions about that information. Read On: