author_img
by |
September 1, 2014

shutterstock_163345205

Many businesses look at Business Intelligence (BI) as a standalone solution that provides information to help the company better its business results. But, business intelligence serves another very important purpose. Take a step back and look at BI in a different way and you will find that a business intelligence solution can encourage and improve collaboration among team members and employees. Employee collaboration is key to enterprise success, because it ensures that team members are working together, with a common body of information, to make the best decisions for the business and to ensure success at every level of the organization.To use business intelligence tools in a collaborative way, the enterprise must select a BI and Corporate Performance Management (CPM) solution that is sophisticated, yet easy enough for every user and, most importantly, can be easily customized to satisfy the needs of every executive, manager, and without the need for analysts or IT professionals. When you introduce this kind of power and make it available to every employee, the business can empower team members to contribute to the bottom line and easily understand how their function and role fits into overall strategy and operational goals. Business intelligence tools can be used at the tactical, operational and strategic level to build a cohesive view of data, identify problems, forecast results and objectively measure goals, objectives and strategies.

###

If you empower employees to collaborate, share alerts, reports and data and identify issues before they become problems, you are much more likely to achieve a comprehensive view of all of the issues and factors that influence success. Personalized dashboards and alerts and publishing capability give the business the sophisticated tools they need to improve the bottom line and leverage their resources. Most employees truly want to collaborate but they are frequently frustrated by cumbersome, expensive software solutions that don’t support human interaction or a true understanding of business issues.

So, how do we give our employees a simple way to cut through Big Data, find, sort and filter Business Intelligence to get to information that helps them do their jobs and contribute to the bottom line? Can dashboard software provide sophisticated tools that are easy enough for the average user to customize so that they get personal alerts, and design intuitive reports to share, use forecasting and predictive analysis tools, key performance indicators, balanced scorecards, graphic tools, cube management and all necessary tools with programmers or analysts? Information overload and prohibitive complexity occurs for many reasons, not the least of which is simple intuitive data display, easy integration of data and the ability to manage the dashboard software and business intelligence tools to accommodate growth and changing requirements.

If you truly want to empower your employees and hold them accountable for their decisions, you must engender a collaborative environment – one in which your team members can easily share and analyze information. Imagine a world where users receive critical alerts to tell them that a threshold has been crossed and where that user can tag or note information for other users to comment. Without sitting around a conference room table, your team can develop an appropriate solution on the road or in the office, with insight from, and collaboration with, all team members. That’s how business intelligence can engender collaboration!