Data intelligence technology is helping firms in industries ranging from cybersecurity and law enforcement to insurance and healthcare unlock the value of their data stores and streams. It enables organizations to better understand the information they collect and derive actionable insights that inspire innovation and creativity. Data intelligence tools make it easier for users to search for and work with the data they need to evaluate complex situations and find solutions. A data platform can help users look at data in new ways and facilitate an organization’s efforts to improve decision making, streamline operations, anticipate and mitigate risk, take advantage of key opportunities, and adapt to change.

Processes involved in data intelligence

In order to help organizations provide their users with access to trustworthy, accurate data and make it easier for users to find and understand the data relevant to their workflows, data intelligence platforms, and vendors should offer support for some or all the following functions:

• Metadata management, which involves creating, collecting, and organizing data that describes other data and establishing policies to ensure that data can be integrated, accessed, shared, and analyzed across the organization
• Data profiling and cleansing, which involves examining data sets to identify, investigate, and fix data quality issues such as outlier values that may be inaccurate, inconsistencies, incorrect formatting, incompleteness, and duplication
• Data cataloging, which involves discovering, inventorying, tagging, and creating semantic relationships among distributed and disparate data and providing a unified view of an organization’s information assets
• Data governance, which involves establishing a secure and governed environment to ensure data integrity and support consistent and appropriate use of an organization’s data by enforcing roles and accountability
• Data discovery and visualization, which involves facilitating access to and exploration of data visually and through a shared data intelligence environment that allows users to load, combine, manipulate, and analyze data from diverse sources
• Data literacy, which involves educating and empowering decision-makers with the skills they need to feel comfortable working and communicating with data whether through BI reporting or the use of a business data analytics or big data analytics tool

The data intelligence advantage

By democratizing data, or by making data and data analytics capabilities available to a wide range of users in a governed environment, data intelligence platforms are helping organizations overcome a number of challenges. Namely, they enable firms to more easily manage and integrate data and provide self-service access to data and powerful analytics tools to business users, removing the IT bottleneck that delays many reporting and analytics initiatives. Data intelligence solutions put data and data insight into the hands of the people who need it most. Users spend less time preparing data and more time collaborating and turning insights into action. Firms can accelerate project delivery, thereby reducing time to insight and boosting productivity, and significantly improve the speed and quality of decision making. Over time, employees become confident in working with data and can help create a truly insights-driven organization.

Leveraging cutting-edge technology for data intelligence

The newest generation of data intelligence solutions is leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques to analyze high-volume data sets faster and more accurately—a must for big data and IoT analytics initiatives. AI is being used to identify data types, find connections, and automatically generate data models, accelerating time-consuming data preparation tasks. AI can learn human error patterns, detect potential flaws in data, and resolve data quality issues at scale without human intervention.

With AI suggesting relationships in and surfacing insights from data, even non-technical business users can discover important trends and patterns in their organization’s data. Users get fast access to high-quality data and innovative capabilities like visual and conversational analytics that allow users to interact with data in intuitive ways. Non-data scientists can navigate and uncover unexpected insights from large, diverse data sets, taking advantage of data science to make impactful discoveries.

Accelerate data intelligence with Qlik

With business in over 100 countries and over two decades of experience, Qlik has built a robust, end-to-end data integration and analytics platform that is helping organizations around the world transform their data into real value—into insights that drive transformation. It is the only data intelligence solution on the market that allows for open-ended, curiosity-driven exploration, enabling users of all skill levels to make discoveries in data. Qlik’s unique Associative Engine indexes all relationships in your data, letting users search and explore freely and without the limitations of pre-aggregated data or predefined queries.

With Qlik Data Catalog®, empowering users with on-demand access to gold-standard data is easy. Qlik’s modern enterprise data management solution helps you onboard your existing data fast by automatically validating, profiling, and documenting the exact content, structure, and quality of your data. Qlik streamlines the transformation of raw data into trusted, business-ready information assets and builds a Smart Data Catalog, a marketplace where users can find, use, and share data from any source. And with enterprise-grade data governance and security built-in, you can be sure that your data assets are safe and secure.

With Qlik Sense®, Qlik’s next-generation, AI-fueled business data analytics platform, you can put the power of data science in the hands of non-technical users. Business users get access to accelerated data preparation and advanced analytics capabilities allowing them to tackle even the most complex analytical challenges. AI-powered insight suggestions and smart visualizations help users uncover insights they won’t find with query-based BI tools. They can easily combine and load data and drag and drop to build interactive dashboards, visually-rich reports, and rich analytics applications. Thanks to Qlik’s flexible, multi-cloud architecture, you can deploy your way and scale confidently while creating a data literate workforce.

FAQs

What is the difference between business intelligence and data analytics?

Until recently, business intelligence has been a descriptive endeavor focused on understanding and reporting on existing business processes while data analytics encompasses descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive efforts. However, as the newest generation of BI tools comes to incorporate more advanced statistical modeling and analytics techniques, the boundary between the two is blurring.

What is the difference between data, information, and intelligence?

Data refers to facts while information is a collection of those facts, or a series of data points. Intelligence is actionable insights or knowledge extracted from that information. BI and analytics tools are used to analyze data in order to produce information and, with the help of AI and/or humans, derive intelligence from that data.

What is data intelligence?

It refers to technology and tools used to produce and make available to users trusted, analytics-ready data and assist users in extracting actionable insights, i.e. intelligence, from that data. It enables organizations to obtain real value from their data—to use data to drive innovation and transformation.