Digital advancements in cloud computing and mobile applications have completely transformed our daily lives. Data-driven tools and tactics are now available to companies, allowing them to understand more about their customers and themselves than ever before. Still, not everyone is making use of them.
Businesses can notice internal patterns and improve inefficiencies before it’s too late because they can act on insights sooner. In a market where data is becoming increasingly abundant, the ability to interpret and convert information into practical business decisions is critical for better understanding customer behavior and outperforming competitors. This is where Business Intelligence becomes crucial in an organization’s performance and long-term viability.
What is Business Intelligence?
By definition, business intelligence (BI) uses tools and services to transform data into actionable insights that help an organization make strategic and tactical choices. BI tools access and analyze data sources, then present the results as reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts, and maps to give users extensive information about the condition of the business.
The importance of BI boils down to the practice of turning data-driven decision-making, which has long been the craze in business and other settings, into a practical reality. One of the essential purposes of developing a BI strategy is to extract insight from consumer data and make better decisions on behalf of clients.
Advantages of using BI tools in overall Business Operations:
1. Increase in the number of sales due to better targeting strategies.
2. They boost operational productivity and product development with a better understanding of customer requirements based on market trends.
3. They help develop more effective business strategies to figure optimal marketing platforms based on simplified data of ideal customers.
4. Improved and accelerated decision-making supported by BI tools and analytical suggestions.
5. BI tools help in identifying business issues to be addressed before they even occur.
6. They help in identifying upcoming market and business trends to maintain a stable rate of customer acquisition.
7. They help in acquiring a competitive edge by performing competitor analysis with technologically advanced BI platforms.
Statistics based on Business Intelligence:
1. In 2020, 54% of businesses stated that cloud-based business intelligence is critical to their present and future activities.
2. In 2021, Microsoft Power BI is the most used BI software, with 36% of the market share.
3. With a 7.6% CAGR, the worldwide business intelligence market will grow from $23.1 billion in 2020 to $33.3 billion in 2025.
Traditional BI and Modern BI
The conventional business intelligence model relied on static reports to solve the majority of analytical inquiries, which used a top-down approach where the IT organization led business intelligence. If a follow-up query concerning the static information was received, the request would be pushed to the bottom of the reporting queue, and the procedure would be restarted. This conventional process resulted in delayed, inconvenient reporting cycles, and executives could not make data-driven decisions.
Modern business intelligence, on the other hand, is interactive and approachable. While IT departments remain a vital aspect of managing data access, many users can quickly configure dashboards and create reports. Users can visualize data and answer their queries using the right tools.
The general Business Intelligence processes
1. Data collection and Reporting:
The data records of an organization’s everyday transactions are the raw material for business intelligence. Data can come from various sources, including customer contacts, staff management, operation management, and financial administration.
Data from everyday transactions gets captured in three primary transactional databases, according to the traditional approach like CRM (customer relationship management), HRM (human resource management), and ERP (enterprise resource planning) (enterprise resource planning). A sales transaction, for example, would be captured and saved as a piece of data in the CRM database.
2. Analyzing data to turn it into Valuable Knowledge:
Analyzing data entails posing queries to it and receiving valuable responses. In Excel, the simple command “sort in descending order” on a column of data reflecting year-to-date orders taken by sales rep would answer the queries “Who is taking the most orders?” and “Who is taking the most orders?” “What are the fewest orders?” This data can be contextualized by the sort command, making it considerably more meaningful in strategic objectives.
BI analysis is far more complicated and diverse than this. Today’s better business intelligence solutions have powerful and interactive analysis tools that make it easier to ask data an increasing number of questions and get meaningful answers–including “what-if” scenarios, multidimensional slicing and dicing, data mashups with geographic mapping, and much more.
3. Making decisions to achieve Strategic Goals:
Business intelligence acts as a lever that allows a corporation to more efficiently “lift” itself toward its strategic objectives. With quality-analyzed data, making strategic decisions to achieve business goals becomes more fluent.
A corporation may quickly make more data-driven marketing decisions to capitalize on their products or services by monitoring trends to establish client preferences with simplified data. Promotional returns can be identified, and campaign outcomes can be analyzed using data analytics software and BI tools.
Future of Business Intelligence:
We will see all old business methodologies wear out as business intelligence tools become more prominent in today’s industry. In the future of business intelligence, elements such as streamlined workflow and predictive analysis will become more prevalent.
BI tools will become more collaborative to facilitate teamwork. With BI tools, integrating third-party systems will be simple. Proactivity-focused features will automatically respond to inquiries and bring relevant data to the most excellent use with the help of AI.
As we proceed into the era of Big Data, we will witness many more improvements in BI. Business intelligence in the future will most likely be considerably more automated and aggressively used, with fewer obstacles in terms of interface limits and data flow. Future BI trends are all part of a rapidly growing model critical to modern firms’ success.
To sum it up
Many companies attempt to obtain more control over the vast amount of data available on the market. Learning to use new technology effectively is complex, and understanding new technology can take time. When it comes to decision-making, technical advancements such as those found in business intelligence can significantly impact its operations and general procedures.
We hope that this piece of information has provided you with enough value to consider implementing the best BI tools in your business. We’d also appreciate it if you could provide us with your helpful input. Please look at our other helpful articles and blogs on our website, based on Martech, HR-Tech, Fintech, and Emergetech.
Rajvansh Adagale is a well versed content writer with over more than 2 years of experience in most forms of writing. He is experimental in his writing style and research for content. Also a huge believer of Seth Godin's idea of "write as you speak". Rajvansh believes in establishing a conversation with the minds of the reader to build a connection.
