Understanding your business better through data is vital with the advancement of technology. Business intelligence or “BI” strategy if well applied, allows companies and organizations to obtain a complete and detailed view of data for planning and actions. That's what you'll see in this article.
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Contents
Toggle- What Business Intelligence (BI) is
- How BI supports companies
- Main benefits of Business Intelligence
- Some situations where business intelligence can be effective
- The importance of BI
- Traditional ID x Modern BI
- Recommended practices for implementing the BI
- Conclusion
What Business Intelligence (BI) is
It's the process of bringing up and analyzing data in a company to make informed business decisions. The BI covers a wide spectrum of technologies and methods, from the way data are organized and analyzed to how findings are reported. The ID is used to answer as a company was in the past and why these results came about.
The execution of a successful business intelligence strategy requires a strong organization of how data is used from start to finish:
- Data collection : a company needs to understand where it can collect visitor and customer data and how they can be organized in a form that can be analyzed.
- Data storage : The data relevant to the companies are numerous and generally of great scope. To be useful, this data should be stored in a location that interested parties can reliably access, as in an SQL database. A storage solution should always be up to date so that the company can act quickly on changes in data.
- Data analysis : the core of business intelligence is focused on descriptive and diagnostic analysis, which answer questions about where your company has been, where it is now and why things are as they are now. BI tools need to be able to use data storage to perform these different types of analyses.
- Data reports : All our data and analyses will not be useful if they do not reach decision makers and other stakeholders. The BI must transmit data and insights so that people with less context can still understand them quickly and use them to make decisions.
How BI supports companies
The overall objective of business intelligence is to allow a company to make real decisions with real data. A company with a functional BI strategy will have accurate, complete and organized data.
Business intelligence can be used to show historical patterns to help stakeholders assess their organization's health, alerting them about problems and possible improvements.
Business intelligence can also help organize teams by keeping them aware of the main performance indicators (KPIs). Knowledge of KPIs through dashboards and reports keeps teams aligned and focused on their goals.
Easy access to metrics and KPIs also releases time and energy to perform tasks that will impact the company's performance.
Main benefits of Business Intelligence
- Provide business information or organization in a timely and efficient manner
- Establish performance indicators aligned with business strategies
- Provide teams with access to data so they can be capacitated.
- Save time when reporting and entering data.
- Sales information can be shown transparently
Some situations where business intelligence can be effective
- View the volume of visitors and users on a site over time
- Track potential customers through a sales pipeline
- Measure the performance of business metrics in relation to benchmarks and targets
- Evaluate the performance of marketing campaigns and experiments
- Segment users by demographic characteristics
- Generate reports for team and executive decision making
The importance of BI
Business intelligence software is the tools that allow you to create value from your data, such as dashboards or reports. BI tools typically provide historical and current data in the context to allow informed decision making and the development of predictions.
The business intelligence sector moves quickly to keep pace with the changes and demand of its users. According to Forbes, 54% of companies they mention that cloud business intelligence (BI cloud) is critical or very important for current and future strategies.
Business intelligence creates order in a chaotic universe of data. Whether it is for data visualization or data storage tools, BI is about implementing a strategy to get more value from your data.
And although this may seem scary, BI is not reserved for companies with large IT budgets, it is also used to democratize data and provide you with the highest value regardless of the size or scope of your business.
Traditional ID x Modern BI
Historically, business intelligence was an IT-owned function. This led to a top-down approach with reports and analyses. The decision makers would have to ask teams for an analysis or report, creating a barrier to access reports and insights in real time.
As functionality and software became, so did the property. Modern BI is a central business function that is accessed and owned throughout the organization. One of the main benefits of modern BI is accessibility.
Users can access and interact with real-time data and create reports and panels almost instantly, removing barriers to entry.
Now business intelligence covers tools, methodologies and technologies that allow self-service analysis. It can be as simple as logging in and accessing panels, reports, and analytics that turn data points into digestible insights.
Recommended practices for implementing the BI
The implementation of business intelligence is not limited to choosing the right tools: it also requires the appropriate support of the organization and its staff. Keep in mind the following tips to ensure that when investing in a BI strategy, the information the process returns is valuable to your company.
1. Ensure that the tool meets business needs
Before you go out there signing a BI tool, make sure that your resources really work as solutions to the organization's doubts before you finalize a commitment. Plan how you expect the BI tool to be used by the company.
Gold tip: Search internally and externally and make a list of desired business intelligence resources to understand the priorities you need in your BI strategy.
Each BI tool offers compensations between its features, so determine which features are most important to your company and select the tool that best suits your needs.
2. Establish a work data pipeline
Getting significant results from a BI marketing tool requires significant inputs. Having a functional data pipeline for data collection and storage is a prerequisite for performing data analysis.
When data is unreliable, it can be difficult to work with results. If the data is not complete, the information gaps may result in hasty actions.
Make sure that the company data is structured and organized before you start analyzing them. People who manage the data will need to be in sync with what users need to make the analysis useful and actionable.
Collecting data from many different sources and storing it in data lakes, warehouses and marts can be a considerable effort in terms of time and money. Exercitate good data management is a necessary step to become informed by data, and the work you put at the beginning can save more pain later.
3. Encourage active use of BI tools
It may take some effort to educate and train employees to use the BI tools you have chosen. A good onboarding that teaches about the proper use of the tool is necessary to ensure that users obtain accurate information from the data.
However, although BI application interfaces have become more intuitive, learning to work with a tool still requires patience and many tests.
One suggestion is to have someone in charge of leading the BI adoption efforts with the teams. Let him be an evangelizer and leader to engage more people in the use of BI tools.
Team leaders and executives can also provide valuable energy to support the construction effort. The more people are using analytics tools, the more effective their implementation will be. In addition to generating more insights, users can rely on each other to get the most important data they need to make right decisions.
Integration and collaboration with other tools
The ease of you integrating Business tools Intelligence with other channels is also part of the main features that BI covers.
If you also use marketing channels or tools at your company, you probably need to integrate them with a BI system. With fortune, there are software that facilitates the process.
For example, with Kommo, a CRM system, businesses can access data from their leads and sales pipeline. This data is of great help to enrich your company's Business Intelligence and make better decisions.
Conclusion
As we have seen so far, the IB is moving rapidly to become more accessible and easy for all companies. Businesses that leverage the power of the BI undoubtedly have a competitive advantage over those who do not.
Business intelligence empowers teams as much as it empowers your business. Companies have found that allowing employees to access and track analytical and operational data improves efficiency and work goals by monitoring real-time efforts along with a business plan.
The power of BI offers companies the opportunity to tell their data stories, work faster and smarter, adopt an open and transparent workplace and achieve better results.
Include Business Intelligence in your strategies and use the data to go to the next level!
