Business intelligence and analytics are necessary tools for every business today. No business manager or team member can make decisions in vacuum and business intelligence and analytics tools are key to fact-based, data-driven decisions that will ensure positive results, help the business to avoid missteps and critical errors and allow the enterprise to anticipate changes in the competitive landscape and in customer buying behavior.
Data analytics is a necessity in today’s competitive business market. It isn’t enough to guess at the cause of a problem or guess at the results you expect next year. In order to compete, you will need business analytics and self-service BI tools that allow each one of your business team members to see and use data in a way that is meaningful to them and that will help them to do their job more accurately, to make better decisions, to share and use data with confidence.
What is business intelligence? It is quite simple, really. Business intelligence is ‘intelligence’ about ‘business’. Having said that, we cannot really presume that ‘intelligence’ is simply data. Data on its own tells us little and can, at times, actually confuse the very issue you are trying to understand. In order to get to the heart of the business intelligence definition it is useful to consider that the word ‘intelligence’ as defined in the dictionary as ‘the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’.
When your business begins the process of choosing or changing business intelligence tools and business intelligence services, it is easy to get confused! There are many choices in the market and not all of them are created equal. A business intelligence company offering solutions, features and functionality for advanced analytics must be suitable for your requirements or your initiative will not succeed.
When you are looking for a BI solution, do not ignore the trend toward data democratization and data literacy among your team members. To create the greatest assets to your company and improve team member value, you want to provide access to critical data and a simple way to perform advanced analytics so that users will adopt BI tools and you can create a social BI environment with improved data popularity and power users who will share knowledge and encourage the use of data and fact-driven decision-making.
Don’t let business analytics intimidate you! Whether you are a small, medium or large enterprise; whether you have an unlimited budget or a tight budget, whether you have a team of analysts and data scientists or one individual struggling to provide the data your team needs to make decisions – you CAN and MUST embrace data analytics.
In spite of the fact that trade publications and business conferences have been talking about business intelligence and BI software for years, there are still some business executives and business owners that do not understand how business intelligence tools can help the organization achieve its goals and stay ahead of the competition.
A business might wonder how to justify the implementation and cost of business intelligence tools when, in fact, it is more difficult to justify the decision NOT to implement a BI solution. A BI solution can provide targeted, concise information with which the business and business users can make fact-based decisions, and it can provide insight into trends and patterns that will help to dictate new product and service decisions, pricing decisions, staffing and training decisions and more.
KPI Analytics is important to every company. Key performance indicators, or KPIs, help a business to monitor and measure business success by looking at specific factors, activities, tasks and processes. Often, an industry has a standard set of KPI examples it uses that is widely accepted as measurement for success but, many times, the business has its own unique way of measuring success and, when used correctly, KPI software can help the business to identify issues and change processes or policies before the issue results in a negative impact to the bottom line.
If your business wants to democratize data and provide access to business intelligence tools to satisfy the needs of every business user, you may want to engage a business intelligence consultant to help you better understand your requirements for data and systems integration and to plan a simple, straightforward implementation and training schedule that will get you where you want to go, quickly and easily.
