Introduction
The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to applications, practices, and technologies used for the integration, collection, analysis, and presentation of business information.
| Note: The worldwide BI software market is predicted to reach $26.78 billion by the year 2020. Along with big data, the worldwide BI and analytics software market is valued at $54.1 billion and is expected to grow by 11.2% CAGR within 2022. |
Benefits of Business Intelligence
- Faster Analysis and Intuitive Dashboards: BI platforms are designed for heavy-duty processing of data available on the company’s servers or on the cloud.
| Fact Check: BI helped Lenovo increase their reporting efficiency by 95 percent across various departments. |
- Increase in Organizational Efficiency: As organizations spend lesser hours on compiling reports and data analysis, BI systems provide more time to utilize data available for improving businesses.
| Fact Check: Pfizer uses BI platforms to collaborate among departments, have developed models to optimize patient diagnosis, and efficient ways to perform clinical trials. |
- Data-Driven Business Decisions: Having access to the correct and precise data and faster reporting abilities help in making good business decisions.
| Fact Check: MillerCoors personalized mobile dashboards for their sales team to view sales forecasts and real-time data before meeting potential clients. |
- Increased Competitive Advantage: With BI, organizations can benefit and be more competitive, once they aware of the market and their performance in it.
| Fact Check: Rosenblatt Securities analysed data using various sources and predicted the best possible time to enter the market and position themselves strategically. |
Top Trends in BI
- Data Quality Management (DQM): Good data quality is important for gaining appropriate insights from the data available and to make the right decisions. DQM is crucial for organizations to avoid poor data quality and leverage the investments in BI technologies. DQM-related processes guarantee that an organization will obtain compliance with data quality standards and regulations globally.
- Business Intelligence for Sales and Marketing: With the use of BI dashboards, sales and marketing professionals can access the latest sales and purchasing trends. Following are a few ways in which BI tools improve the sales or marketing activity:
- Improve the precision of sales forecasts and targets.
- Devise new business strategies.
- Analyse the impact of the latest marketing campaigns or promotions.
- Identify and focus on the most valuable customers.
- Data Discovery: Data discovery is a business process meant for distinguishing patterns and to derive insights from data through data analytics tools. With the availability of such tools, business trends and variances can be identified.
- Artificial Learning (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in Business Intelligence: 97% of industry experts can see a huge role for technologies such as AI and ML in marketing. AI and ML can also be integrated in business strategies related to BI and analytics.
- Predictive Analytics and Reporting: With the availability of big data for data analytics, BI tools can be used to determine future business trends from the current data patterns.
- Collaborative BI: Collaborative BI is the collaboration between BI technology and online collaboration tools such as Web technologies and social media. Collaborative BI is associated with faster decision-making processes, as it enables seamless sharing of BI reports with improved interactivity within business users.
- Data Automation: Gartner predicts that 40% of all data science-related tasks will be automated by the year 2020. Data automation solutions consolidate data that enables analysts to analyse and collate large data volumes.
Roadblocks to Implementing Business Intelligence
To successfully implement BI within an organization, leaders need to formulate a strategy, a roadmap, and assign resources. BI systems may require several months before there is considerable ROI. However, various organizations find success by creating innovative ways to use BI, in turn reducing operating costs, improving profits, and making a long-term commitment for creating a data culture.
Conclusion
As AI technology progresses, BI platforms will gain more prominence, thus enabling organizations to deal more with data. Solutions such as Google Analytics may no longer be as useful, especially for larger organizations.
