Think about searching for a needle in a haystack without any tools. Chances are it’ll take a long time to find, if you do at all. Now imagine how much faster and easier it’d be doing so with a powerful magnet.
In today’s business world, haystacks are the massive amount of data companies store. And business intelligence (BI) is the tool that finds and extracts important insights—a task that could take human analysts hours upon hours to do by hand.
Here’s more on what modern BI offers businesses today.
BI Monetizes Data
BI is much more than just an optional add-on in today’s corporate landscape. It’s more advantageous to think of it as a way to turn structured data into tangible value. BI shapes the very way in which organizations make decisions because it helps employees discover helpful insights. It’s becoming clearer over time that companies seeking to maximize revenue and minimize inefficiency need all the data-driven insights they can get.
In other words, BI helps monetize data. According to TDWI, here are just a few ways in companies can monetize their data using BI:
- Identifying new opportunities for revenue (products, markets and customer segments).
- Minimizing customer churn and boosting retention rates.
- Optimizing various links of the supply chain.
- Identifying revenue leaks and correcting wastage.
It’s safe to assume there’s plenty of useful insights lurking within your company’s data. BI is how you extract them so you can put them to good use.
BI Uncovers Trends
BI helps people perform their jobs better—it doesn’t tell employees exactly what to do. But modern BI has also advanced beyond merely generating reports based on past performance data. As one CIO contributor writes, “Rather, BI offers a way for people to examine data to understand trends and derive insights.” People are still in charge of interpreting their findings and putting them into action, but BI helps them dive deep into data to get the insights in the first place.
There are a few approaches to harnessing the power of BI. Search-driven analytics lets employees ask questions and receive answers, similarly to how you’d use an online search engine to find information. So, people using a search-driven BI tool need to know what they’re seeking. Artificial intelligence-driven analytics, on the other hand, deploys insight-detection algorithms that dig up trends and anomalies—meaning these types of tools supply insights without requiring a specific question. Platforms like ThoughtSpot with full-stack business intelligence architecture facilitate both approaches to BI, depend on an organization’s needs.
BI Is Now Fast and Accessible
Perhaps biggest advantage modern BI offers is sheer convenience when it comes to working with data. No longer does data have to be the realm of IT specialists and analysts alone. The latest wave of BI technology is capable of making ad hoc insights available to all—marketers, executives, HR specialists, sales associates, supply chain coordinators, finance directors, etc. Giving users direct access to data removes yet another hurdle standing between them and monetizing data. Modern BI is democratizing data by removing silos that have traditionally held organizations back.
The latest BI tools can also crunch the numbers in seconds or minutes—producing automatic charts, to boot. This saves employees the wait time between requesting a report and waiting for it to arrive. It also spares employees the trouble of having to manually create data visualization models based on datasets.
It’s clear modern BI has a lot to offer businesses: speed and accessibility of insights, multiple approaches to querying and the opportunity to capitalize on all that data they’ve been storing.
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