Business Intelligence (BI) is a buzzword gaining momentum among the C-Suite group. . It is as popular as Artificial intelligence (AI), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML). But is it more than what it is really supposed to be or do business leaders ignore it to avoid capital expenditure? In this blog, we delve into the nature of BI and what it has in store for organizations.

In the age of smartphones, business have a brilliant opportunity to reach out to potential customers at an individual level. But bespoke business operations such as customer central digital marketing strategies, customer engagement, evaluation of consumer behavior, inventory planning, understanding manufacturing capacity and financial forecasting requirements, are expensive. For stakeholders and business leaders to benefit from such business initiatives they need the power of business intelligence.

At its core, it isn’t very different from data analytics services that focus on unifying incoming business sources to extract insights. The differences appear when the volume, chronology, and historical context of business data are considered. Business Intelligence Solutions equip businesses with the ideal tool that helps make accurate and powerful strategic decisions. With the help of such tools, companies can pull themselves out of a slump or foray into newer markets to diversify their product or service portfolio.

How Business Intelligence Services Have Changed Business Operations

Wouldn’t it be great if business leaders had a crystal ball? A quick spell and they could peek into the future and steer their business towards profitability. While BI solutions aren’t magic, what they can achieve today would be considered the stuff of science fiction not more than three decades ago.

Today, BI applications and services can predict business outcomes, profile customers according to their personal tastes, assist with the deployment of workforce and deliver detailed reports of what is causing revenue leakage within an organization. Here are they ways Business intelligence has been a paradigm altering force in the business world.

Data Visualization: BI applications with intuitive dashboards provide business leaders with access to meaningful data with real world impact. By presenting important insights in the form of graphs, BI applications make a powerful impact on the minds of the C-Suite, helping business decision-making that can give a company an edge over the competition. From performance metrics to action points, BI tools leverage data visualization to present a bird’s eye view of organizational, departmental, and financial performance to decision-makers of an organization.

Data Connectivity: Traditionally, the presence of multiple data sources have impeded the possibility of altering or pivoting business strategies in a timely manner to improve profitability. The advent of business intelligence solutions has made the unification of these data sources such as emails, spreadsheet, reports, customer survey data, interaction details from mobile application, social media interactions, etc. possible. BI strategies today provide businesses a time-bound longitudinal view of their business context giving them granular insights. They not only deliver action points but also the power of choice with business decisions.

Scheduled Reporting: Information that arrives late is of no use to businesses. The timeliness of useful information is the key to success with data analytics services. BI solutions establish a chronological standard for report generation and distribution. With the latest improvements in BI solutions to a ‘self-service’ oriented function, end users can query and extract specific information about business operations such as staffing, monthly performance, individual performance and common pitfalls causing revenue leakage.

Pace and Accuracy of Insights: Technological improvements in mobile, enterprise and cloud computing have fostered the development of powerful BI solutions which significantly improve the pace of reporting. Besides the sheer speed of analytics, they also excel in the accuracy of business insights using predictive algorithms to trigger decisions. Such BI platforms have led businesses to explore new markets and make headway in product and service diversification.

Personal Analytics: A synergy between a business organization and its workforce is imperative for its success. Traditionally, most businesses evaluated the performance of the workforce annually based on KPI tracking. The self-service nature of modernized business intelligence solutions combined with the power of cloud computing platforms enables individuals to identify better with organizational KPIs, track them over a period of time and make changes to their work approach to help them stay on track.

To BI or Not To BI?

The number of advantages of using BI solutions to channelize productivity outweigh its cons which are usually related to expenditure. In a highly competitive world of the digital age, business intelligence services offer more than just a strategic advantage. They offer businesses a looking glass that identifies micro fractures in their business strategy, hampering their profitability.

However, it is only a competent business partner with extensive experience with data warehousing and ETL services strategy that can help businesses realize the potential of business intelligence services.

Ready to tap into Intelligence? Send us an email at info@nalashaa.com for a free consultation with our BI experts!