Business intelligence can help organizations of all sizes leverage data to boost revenue and profits.
It’s been said that organizations are drowning in information but starving for knowledge. Organizations today collect enormous amounts of data from numerous sources, but the problem is how to turn that information into insight.
For example, businesses have spent billions on enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management applications only to find that these systems collect data wonderfully but tend to produce reports that nobody wants to read. In an attempt to make sense of the data stuck in these big-ticket enterprise systems, many organizations have invested heavily in business intelligence (BI) software.
BI software is designed to give an organization the ability to extract meaning from its data. With these tools, companies can mine the raw data they obtain from multiple sources to expose patterns of customer behavior and make informed business decisions. This insight into market trends and customer habits can help companies identify cost-cutting ideas, uncover new business opportunities, develop crossover sales leads, react quickly to retail demand, optimize prices and more.
Think Big
The value of a well-conceived BI strategy is becoming more evident in all organizations, but particularly in small to midsize business (SMBs), according to a recent report by Aberdeen Group. With the emergence of Software as a Service (SaaS), open source BI, and other on-demand approaches, the analytical firepower that was once reserved for the heaviest wallets in the industry is now available to smaller and more resource-conscious organizations.
“Many companies, particularly smaller organizations, suffer from a lack of transparency when it comes to the key aspects of their business that drive performance. As a result, data shows that SMBs are turning to BI in order to improve visibility into these business processes,” explains Michael Lock, research analyst for business intelligence at Aberdeen Group.
In the past, BI software was of limited usefulness to those outside of IT departments. BI tools focused on querying, reporting and multi-dimensional analysis on top of a data warehouse were too complex, costly and disengaged from everyday software tools to provide much help to the average end-user. By treating business intelligence as a set of technologies rather than an essential business process, organizations tend to create increasingly complex systems that fail to meet user needs.
Today, business intelligence is evolving as a platform not just for the IT department, but for everyone else. The latest BI applications give everyone in the organization access to simple tools that allow them to utilize analytics, alerts and feedback mechanisms to improve individual performance. In such an environment, critical data that once was available only to corporate analysts can be placed into the hands of business users throughout the organization, giving them direct access to information they can use to make better decisions, create more effective plans, and respond more quickly to problems and opportunities.
Tools You Can Use
Aberdeen Group collected data from 530 SMB organizations globally and found that these companies are exploring a multitude of deployment options for BI in order to affect more functions within the organization as well as more job roles within each function. Leading SMBs were able to implement their BI solutions in an average of 14 days, enabling them to expend fewer resources to deploy and manage the BI solutions, and to reduce the total cost of ownership of their BI strategy.
The research firm also found that 99 percent of top-performing organizations were able to deliver BI to their employees in a self-service, non IT-assisted capacity, helping improve adoption of the tools and spread them throughout the organization. By leveraging a simultaneously tactical and strategic approach to BI, these SMBs were able to spread BI across their organizations in order to produce substantial revenue and profit growth.
Some BI software packages now include simple query and analysis tools that allow users to extract business information and answer ad hoc questions themselves, without advanced knowledge of the underlying data sources and structures. For example, a user might type in simple yet extremely practical questions such as “Who are my top customers?” or “Which are my most profitable stores?” and receive the answers quickly through an uncomplicated interface. The data can then be displayed in a basic table or pushed to an Excel spreadsheet.
Interactive visual models allow anyone to quickly turn ordinary spreadsheets into engaging business presentations with dynamic charts and graphs. Performance management products help users track and analyze key business metrics via management dashboards, scorecards, analytics and alerting.
Information is power — that has been the promise of IT for a long time, but it is not delivered very often. Rarely do organizations have tools that business users can actually use. However, the migration toward self-service business intelligence will allow organizations of all sizes to transform that information into knowledge.
