How can a better understanding of business intelligence give your company an edge over the competition?
Approaching business “intelligently” has meant different things to different generations. In the 21st century, the term “business intelligence” most accurately reflects integrating tools and data to best meet your own unique, individual business or company needs. This varies from business to business, by industry, or even by the type of customer base.
Today, the question isn’t “What is business intelligence?” as the answer remains the same. These exciting tools and technologies can help focus growth or revenue, increase and improve processes, generate better customer response, and assist in decision making.
However, what is important is to ask is, “Why exactly do I need business intelligence, and how should I use it?”
If the fact that enterprise revenue is expected to approach $19 billion yearly by 2017 doesn’t demonstrate the value of business intelligence, then the potential of doing things better, faster, and potentially more efficiently across your organization certainly will.
So what business intelligence and analytics tools are companies investing in? What should you consider when evaluating and implementing data analytics and visualization solutions?
Business today is more competitive than ever. Not only are there multiple technology disruptions and innovations changing dozens of business landscapes and industries, but foreign competition is on a constant rise. Companies today want to know what’s ahead, and what’s next. Business intelligence and data analysis can help assess and determine the future in ways that traditional forecasting, trend reporting, and other efforts simply never could.
Oftentimes companies can find themselves paralyzed by the wealth of data and information available today. The big data revolution has helped countless companies become data smart—but extracting the “intelligence” portion still seems out of reach for many. The solution can be to join data warehouses, or determining and establishing actionable insights from what you’ve got on hand. Once you do, data analysis will start to look pretty appetizing, and far less overwhelming than it might seem. If the abundance of information has you frozen in carbon like Hans Solo in Star Wars, it doesn’t have to be that way.
Moving away from running a business on intuition and pie charts that dictate an entire year’s worth of strategy to intelligent decision making with BI tools will not be easy.
