Big data and business intelligence (BI) belong to the bigger analytics umbrella, but they’re not one and the same.
According to Eric D. Brown, a technology and marketing consultant:
“Business intelligence helps find answers to questions you know. Big data helps you find the questions you don’t know you want to ask.”
Long story short:
There’s business intelligence and there’s the new data discovery market.
Just to be clear, in case you heard otherwise:
Big data isn’t about to drive business intelligence to obsolescence anytime soon.
This article, however, won’t focus on the differences between big data and BI at length. Instead, we’ll be outlining eight reasons why it’s high time your company started using Business intelligence software.
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Revenue increases, cost and time savings
Considering how cutthroat the business landscape has become over the years, for a lot of companies, strict cost containment measures are the norm. Even big companies are moving in the same direction to generate the most value for their shareholders.
Tableau Software lists several different ways businesses can minimize costs and improve bottom line performance through BI software:
- Automation of manual data collection and reports generation processes
- Consolidation of multiple BI infrastructures
- Gathering and analysis of data from various channels to discover opportunities to increase revenues
- Identification of the direct correlation between cross-enterprise procedures to boost overall productivity
- Packaging the data you have as a productized offering
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More analysis
Proponents of real-time data analytics insist that traditional business intelligence, which focuses on historical, retrospective data, is severely outdated. Rearview-mirror data is only useful for business events that never deviate from past performances.
But as we all know, for most modern businesses, every day is a new day, with data originating from a host of channels including social media, besides the usual data repositories.
This highlights the need for an analytics platform that can feed decision-makers with both historical and relevant, real-time data to more intelligently and proactively tackle operational issues as they arise.
Some of these platforms include:
- Informatica, a data integration solutions provider, supports operational intelligence to deliver real-time insight into business events and live data from operational systems, and provides a common data access layer to qualify the data used for self-service business intelligence.
- Vanguard System Intelligence combines historical data and management knowledge to help users craft effective business plans.
- TIBCO Spotfire is a platform-agnostic BI solution equipped with visual and interactive tools that assist professionals in uncovering insightful and actionable information from critical data.
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Mobility
As tablets and smartphones become standard workplace tools providing mobile, factory-floor, and field workers the data they need to properly perform their jobs, mobile BI is expected to flourish.
Gartner predicted that 2015 would see over half of mobile BI users relying “exclusively on mobile devices for insight delivery” and that BI users would grow by 20%.
Adi Azaria of Sisense agrees, to a degree:
“For users who are mainly ‘dashboard consumers,’ i.e., their main interest is to be able to keep track of processes within their organization through interactive dashboard reporting, mobile has distinct advantages.”
He went on to point out that data analytics is more than just dashboard reporting, however.
Tech journalist Andy Patrizio, in his Datamation article, has this to say:
“These devices certainly can’t do BI computation with their limited processors, but they can certainly display it. This will allow for decisions to be made in the field and for remote workers to collaborate.”
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Scalability
Maintaining BI infrastructures is a costly and tedious exercise, and BI resources have their limitations.
A BI tool’s ability to scale as your data, user, and functionality requirements grow is a dimension decision-makers must seriously look into. Stunted growth resulting from limited software capabilities is not an appealing proposition.
One advantage of cloud-based solutions over their on-premise counterparts is scalability, sans the sizeable infrastructure investment in terms of money, time, and manpower.
An Information Week commentary by Gartner’s Cindi Howson supports this premise:
“With more choices and scalable databases offered in cloud environments, concerns about cloud BI scalability seem less valid than in the past.”
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Collaboration
More and more business software vendors are weaving in collaborative features into their offerings because collaboration is now perceived as a standard for businesses to succeed.
A good chunk of the world’s businesses are powered by teams, and teams prosper through communication, cooperation, and collaboration.
Collaborative BI is a combination of business intelligence and collaboration frameworks in one platform, enabling teams to share insights, discuss the effects of newly uncovered trends on the business, and even share relevant business knowledge for better, more informed decision-making.
Collaboration in business intelligence, according to an Enterprise Management Associates article, fulfills three essential business requirements:
- Collaborative interaction
- Information enhancement
- Collaborative decision-making
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Centralized database
Imagine an organization with multiple business units, each with a reporting mechanism commensurate with their operational needs.
Now, imagine the CEO of the same organization wanting to know how the performance of each unit stacks up against enterprise-wide targets, how procedural standards in one department correlate with processes in other departments, or how external factors such as interest rates, commodity prices, or unemployment rates in certain areas affect the company’s profitability.
With several disparate reports to look into, furnishing the CEO with all the information he/she needs will take a considerable amount of time.
Modern BI tools facilitate the “centralization of data so that it is accessible to a variety of departments and end users,” says a DATAVERSITY article. “They include data integration technology that allows for the storing of all data relevant to a particular function of a company such as sales, orders, shipping, and pricing.”
Reports generation, as a result, becomes a matter of selecting the appropriate filters and clicking the right buttons in your BI dashboard.
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High-quality information, quickness to respond
The insights provided by business intelligence software can outweigh the initial expenses associated with deploying one.
Having accurate historical and real-time information at your fingertips allows you to:
- Anticipate spikes in demand and respond accordingly, e.g., move products from one business location to another
- Recognize upselling and cross-selling opportunities
- Create new products or services
BI can also be used to recession-proof your organization. This slideshow from Bloomberg cites examples of companies that used business intelligence to manage costs, recognize worsening trends, and stay profitable despite an economic downturn.
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Modeling for the future
A competitive BI product offers predictive modeling capabilities that allow you to forecast future client behavior and business scenarios.
Data stored in your BI system is mined to create statistical models and hypothetical situations to determine the best ways to move forward with your business.
It can offer insights into the actions involved in solidifying your relationships with your most profitable customers, and whether or not training underperforming employees is more favorable to laying them off.
Some examples:
- A customer’s age, gender, and purchase history can result to more sales.
- Internal and external information lets marketers understand how customers react to certain triggers, enabling them to craft more appropriate campaigns.
- Predictive modeling can be used to plan workforce distribution across an organization.
- IT administrators rely on historical data to determine peak resources usage for more effective capacity planning.
Conclusion
A business that fails to swiftly react to market trends and customer behavior, among other things, will have a hard time staying relevant.
With BI software, using the data you already have at your disposal, you gain clear visibility into the issues and opportunities your company may come across, which, in turn, makes you agile, responsive, and innovative.
If you have anything to add or object – the comments are all yours!
The post Business Intelligence Software: Why You Absolutely Need One appeared first on Cloudswave Blog.