According to a recent study, 55% of influential CEOs agree that competing operational priorities are inhibiting the company from changing the way it creates, delivers, and captures value.
How can companies decipher which operations create profit, contribute to business goals, and increase operational efficiency? The answer is Business Intelligence.
The challenge of increasing productivity can be mitigated by implementing business intelligence tools. Not to be confused with big data, which pertains to the sheer quantity, BI automates processes to use important data to provide key insights relating to your unique business operations. From there, analysts can slice and dice quality data in a way that serves their operations.
Using visual dashboards to make the data more digestible, senior leadership teams can use these reports to make data-driven decisions. BI also ensures that employees at every level of the organization are contributing to your corporate vision with user-friendly reporting.
Although every business has different goals and questions regarding the efficiency of its operations, a modern BI workflow is generally accepted. This includes gathering raw data from multiple sources, and then extracting, transforming, and loading the data. On the technical side, software engineers create a single source of truth by creating a data warehouse to form central repositories. General users are now able to access the data and create reporting dashboards, used to present to key stakeholders.
Examples of Business Intelligence tools:
- Power BI
- Tableau
- SQL Server
- Snowflake
- Databricks
Features to look for when choosing a BI provider:
- Dashboards Visualizations
- Reporting
- Data mining
- ETL (extract-transfer-load)
- OLAP (online analytical processing)
- Predictive analysis
“Nearly 50% of all businesses already use BI tools, and projections show continued growth in coming years” (Source)
BI provides key business insights that conventional reports cannot. Using BI, Data Analysts can peak into the future using predictive analysis tools to answer questions like, “Which customer will churn” and “How much should I invest to meet my revenue targets”. Business users then have actionable insights that can only be obtained from robust BI solutions.
Using BI is becoming imperative to staying ahead of the competition, adapting to the marketplace, attracting top talent, and optimizing operations.
Make your data work for you, talk to a BI expert today!
