“Knowledge is power,” as the old saying goes. It’s worth noting there’s a big difference between knowledge and information — especially when it comes to an enterprise’s data strategy. While there’s a huge proliferation of information available for capture, possessing the data alone does not necessarily make it a valuable asset. In other words, having facts on hand is only useful for those with the tools to extract relevance and act accordingly.
This, in a nutshell, is why companies need business intelligence (BI) tools — to turn stored data into an actionable resource capable of driving business performance across various domains. Here’s more on why BI is an absolute must for any competitive enterprise as we move into the increasingly data-driven future.
Turning Data to Insights: BI’s Role in the Modern Enterprise
One important myth to bust about BI is that its core functionality is almost exclusively generating reports, as CIO points out. Rather, it serves as the link between vast amounts of stored data and human users. That is, this software allows users to query and transform data into a format upon which they can reach conclusions and base decisions.
Although legacy BI primarily depended upon creating static reports for users, new business intelligence tools are interactive and powered by artificial intelligence. One way to think about it would be the difference between a scheduled monthly report produced at regular intervals by a team of data specialists vs. an ad hoc chart created by a marketing manager to answer a question about a campaign on the fly.
The latest wave of BI software also prioritizes scalability, with the goal of granting access to a wide variety of end users as needed— also known as self-service — as opposed to restricting data to siloes where only specialized IT teams can access it.
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Advantages of BI for Businesses
So, what are the potential outcomes of implementing better BI?
Here are a few key ways in which organizations reap tangible benefits from their BI strategy:
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Optimizing internal decision-making: Perhaps the single most overarching benefit of BI is fueling faster and more data-based decisions about, well, anything.
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Boosting operational efficiency: If time is money, then internal operations and processes are closely tied to the bottom line. As TechRepublic points out, the insights derived from BI are often useful in helping optimize processes and operations — from employee workflows to product time-to-market to energy usage.
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Improving customer relationships: Data holds the key to understanding how customers are behaving, which means enterprises with the ability to put this data to use can strengthen customer relationships — anticipating customer wants and needs before they themselves do, leading to proactive approaches to customer acquisition and retention.
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Identifying new revenue streams: Another function of BI in enterprise is identifying emerging trends in external and internal markets, helping companies put their eggs in the right baskets, so to speak. As Masters in Data Science notes, BI offers the tools to spot new opportunities and craft data-driven strategies based on customer behavior, current market conditions and potential challenges.
Think about how many decisions, small and large, are made throughout every level of an average enterprise each day — or could be, provided said decision-makers had access to the tech they needed to turn information into know-how. Advanced BI can help drive timely and data-informed decisions; a lack thereof can hinder effective decision-making, costing companies the opportunity to streamline and maximize performance. The scalability, interactivity, speed and AI-powered nature of modern BI is setting up competitive enterprises to get ahead.
