Cloud Business intelligence is witnessing an incredible surge in demand. According to recent data from Dresner’s 2020 Cloud Computing & Business Intelligence Market Report, 95% of enterprise software vendors consider it an essential component of their cloud strategy and 54% of enterprises say it’s very important to their business initiatives. As organizations try to adapt to a post-COVID world, investments in AI and automation are also witnessing massive surges. A recent PWC survey found that 86% of executives were certain that AI will be a mainstream technology at their company in 2021. Similarly, Adobe’s 2020 Digital Trends Report found that 64% of large organizations are using AI to automate data analysis in 2020. If we narrowed down just on business intelligence, Business Application Research Centre’s annual business intelligence trends survey has consistently ranked self-service BI high on their list with Business intelligence in the fifth rank in 2021. The mobile business intelligence market is expected to reach more than $20 billion by 2024, as per the estimates by Mordor Intelligence. In this article we will talk about why business intelligence is important and why your business should make use of strategic business intelligence sooner rather than later with 24/7 IT support.
Understanding Business Intelligence (BI)
Business intelligence systems can be understood as the mother load of all data gathering, data storage, and knowledge management with data analysis that translates complex but separately meaningless data streams into cogent, meaningful, actionable information that forms the baseline of strategic decision-making in every aspect of the organization – strategic, tactical, and operational. Business intelligence environments combine an endless variety of technologies, applications, processes, strategies, products, and technical architectures that are harnessed to collect, analyse, present, and disseminate business information.
Why Is Business Intelligence Important?
Unlock New Insights into your Customers
Business Intelligence is one of the greatest assets a company can have to be able to observe and analyse current customer trends. Observing and understanding customer behavior and motivation can help companies create better products, and new features and additional services for their upcoming or existing line-ups to better serve or even anticipate customer needs. Ultimately, this unlocks your ability to improve your organization’s bottom-line. Leverage the power of business intelligence consultancy with Managed IT Services.
Enhanced Visibility
Armed with the right business intelligence, organizations have better control over their processes and standard operating procedures (SOPs), as the right intelligence allows for enhanced visibility of these functions. This can help you identify long-dormant areas of the business process or organization that need to be revamped for better efficiency and productivity, allowing you to be more proactive.
Actionable Information
A well-designed Business Intelligence system can literally let you read your company’s behavioral patterns and trends over time. This also makes it incredibly easy for decision-makers to understand the impact of different scenarios of organizational processes and changes that they may want to implement and make informed decisions instead of flying in blind.
Competitive Advantage
As Business Intelligence empowers insights into every facet of your operations and business, it can help you ‘read’ your competition better. Business intelligence will help you understand competitor strategies better, allowing you to tweak your own processes or strategies or make better decisions for future endeavors.
What are the IT requirements for Business Intelligence?
Plug and Play
Traditional BI systems were highly complex deployments that made it a huge task for IT teams to deploy and maintain systems efficiently. But modern BI systems are essentially ‘plug and play’ as they are designed to leverage the existing infrastructure and access data directly. There is very little need for IT teams to get involved in the installation or maintenance as most adhere to existing security measures and do not require additional ones to ensure compliance.
See the answer
Overly complicated dashboards have been one of the sore points of traditional BI tools. Many BI pundits have broken this down to be a problem of badly managed data presentation – rather than a problem with the technology itself. Businesses will be best served by dashboard designs that can leverage the potential of visual perception acutely, and enable the user to absorb the maximum possible information in a minimal amount of time.
BI that moves beyond reporting
Modern BI interfaces are being increasingly directed towards problem-solving, rather than just throwing a bunch of data and information at the user. The modern interfaces allow users to blitzkrieg through a massive amount of information through sequential questioning and exploration. Depending on the direction of the analysis, the BI interface should be able to let users query, summarize, cross-tab, hypothesize, visualize while providing the ability to report on-the-fly. IT consulting services can help you harness the power of your data with Business Intelligence Management.
Any data, any time
The analytical needs of each of your employee may be different and not all the data may be readily available. This is why BI interfaces need to provide an appropriate solution for requisitioning external data for analysis. Next generation BI solutions are likely to have the ability to connect to and read the usual data warehouses (OLAP, ROLAP, HOLAP) but also use desktop data such as text files, Excel files, or other data stores that reside outside of BI, without the necessity for reformatting or migrating the data into the warehouse.
