Business Intelligence (BI)

What Is It?

Business Intelligence (BI) helps teams make better decisions using data.
The BI service takes raw data from different places, cleans and organizes it, and turns it into easy-to-understand reports, dashboards, and charts that help answer questions facing UIC colleges and units.

When to Request This Service

Submit a BI service request when you need to:

• Create or enhance dashboards/reports
• Understand trends, performance, or risks using data
• Investigating data availability, quality, or gaps for analytics use
• Enable analytics by preparing or integrating data sources

In-Scope Services

The BI service provides support for the following activities:

Analytics & Visualization

• Design dashboards and reports (operational, tactical, or strategic)
• Discover insights through data-driven storytelling
• Develop custom data visualizations tailored to reporting needs
• Define and standardize KPIs and metrics

Data Management & Pipelines (Analytics-Focused)

• Design and development of analytics-ready data pipelines
• Prepare, transform and enrich data for reporting
• Integrate multiple data sources to support reporting use cases
• Improve data quality through validation and reconciliation

Data Discovery & Advisory

• Assess Information availability and data readiness for reporting
• Investigate data quality impacting reporting
• Consult on data access and best practices for analytics consumption
• Recommend BI tools, datasets, and reporting approaches

Out-of-Scope Services

The following activities are not included in the BI service and may require engagement with other teams or services:

• Application development or operational system design
• Real-time or transactional data processing (outside analytics use cases)
• Develop advanced data science, ML and predictive models
• Perform enterprise data architecture redesign
• Long-term data engineering platform development
• Ongoing data ownership, stewardship, or source-system remediation

Who Is Eligible To Use It?

Staff, Faculty

Where Can I Get It?

Select the Request BI Support button on this page.

How Much Does It Cost?

Currently, there is no cost as we refine this service. 

Service Levels