2011/06/19

Role of Business Intelligence in Software Engineering

A major problem with outsourcing software development is how to analyze the project. Analysis of metrics is an area that is often underutilized in software engineering because of lack of expertise and tools. However, in the business world, data is modelled and analyzed along different dimensions helping in making critical business decisions that can determine profits or loss. These techniques fall under the umbrella of "business intelligence".

Having better predictability in the software engineering process would lead to improvements in many areas, including:

‧ Higher accuracy in cost and time estimates.
‧ Better utilization, and wiser allocation, of project resources.
‧ Clear understanding of business processes and organizations.

The major role of business intelligence in software engineering, when applying the analytical strategies is as follows:

Measuring performance: It is easy to measure the sales person performance in numbers but difficult to measure the performance of a programmer. To measure individual performance becomes a difficult task and resulted in increasing competition and discouraging teamwork. This situation becomes worse in a team dependent organization, such as engineering group. This gives rise to business intelligence techniques for performance analysis for a project or team as a whole rather than on a per-person basis.

Resources: Whenever a new project comes it becomes essential for an organization to identify what resource requirements will be needed in the future to achieve specific goals. This could involve training and hiring. This is broken down by functional departments in order to assess budgetary requirements.

Eliminate guesswork: Managers in IT are greatly benefited from business intelligence. Often, their data lacks any structure to allow them to make truly informed choices. Business intelligence provides more accurate historical data, real-time updates, synthesis between departmental data stores, forecasting and trending, and even predictive 'what if?' analysis," eliminating the need to guess.

Get insight of the customer behavior: The most important benefit of business intelligence is that it allows companies to gain visibility into what customers exactly want, giving them the ability to use this solution in retaining the valuable customers and getting additional profit.

Get key business metrics reports when and where you need them: Business intelligence helps the software vendors to access key business metrics, reports and dashboards related to their project on mobiles devices like their iPhone, iPad, Droid or BlackBerry, giving sales and marketing people access to critical business information on the fly.

Many mobile software development companies offer product services and outsourced the product development in business intelligence software. These companies provide customized, secure, reliable, and easy-to-use software. The business intelligence software is developed exactly to meet the organization and business needs. Software is strongly encrypted to prevent both inside and outside information theft. The data is stored and processed reliably, and backup mechanism to make sure that there is no lose of information due to hardware failures. The interface of the software developed is made user-friendly and presentation of data in simple and clear form.

Christa Joe is the author of this article. She has been demonstrating her writing skills by writing the articles for outsourcing software development companies like Q3 technologies from last two years. She also has a keen interest in writing stuff for warehousing management related firms. For more details, feel free to visit http://www.q3tech.com/


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