What business intelligence features does your small business need?
The standard marketing-speak surrounding business intelligence software goes something like this: business intelligence used to be only for large enterprises, but now it’s for all businesses!
Like much marketing speak, it’s justtrue enough to squeak by. The full truth is more interesting, and a little more complicated. Yes, business intelligence software can benefit your small business. But, your small business has different priorities than an enterprise.
How do you make sure you’re shopping for the BI software features that suit your small business? In other words: how can you go beyond business intelligence, and get small business intelligence?
I’ve searched the web for advice from BI companies and small businesses alike to identify three business intelligence software features your small business can’t do without.
Small businesses are short on time. Where large enterprises may have data analysts paid to crunch their numbers, small businesses don’t have that luxury. Analytics is less of a job title than it is one of the many hats a small business employee wears.
Spending extra time and mental energy analyzing data isn’t a good—or realistic—solution. Enter dashboards: they give you a quick, easy view of multiple metrics.
Lee Nagel of BI vendor Izenda stated: “Small businesses are often challenged with resource constraints, specifically shortages of time, money, and staff to focus on analytics.” In Nagel’s experience, small business people are particularly interested in any solution that saves time and mental energy. Dashboards help small businesses save both.
Dashboards aren’t just money-saving devices, however. They can be part of a better outlook for your employees. One benefit of having your important metrics in one place is its elimination of the need to check multiple data sources. It shifts employee focus away from the process of finding the data onto what can be done with it.
Dashboards are great, but they aren’t the whole story. For them to be useful, you have to make sure they’re filled with the right key performance indicators (KPIs).
Grzegorz Aksamit of Binartech recommends that you stick to five KPIs at most. “I strongly believe that an over-complicated business intelligence deployment for a small company is waste of time and money,” Aksamit says. That’s because a dashboard overloaded with too many KPIs will be too complicated, and “nobody will be able to make use of it.”
He also recommends that your KPIs be indicators of whether your business is growing. As an example, Aksamit cited a food delivery company he worked with.
