Step Into The Real World of Competition
Businesses around the world have evolved in search for more sales, and this has promoted the use of information technology to cater to the changing business needs. Today, it is not just about developing a product or service that satisfies the needs of the masses, but also about each customer’s personal desires that a business needs to understand. While this may sound a tedious and gruesome task, it has actually become a lot easier thanks to improved technology and a range of business intelligence services.
If you have not heard about business intelligence services (BI), you must be struggling to identify your customers as well as your niche in the industry where you can compete effectively and emerge as a leader. To make the concept clearer to you, here is all you need to know.
Difference between Business Analytics (BA) and Business Intelligence (BI)
Do not confuse yourself between business intelligence and business analytics. Business analytics, a technology-aided process uses software to analyze data and predict future activities (predictive analytics) by adopting a certain approach, such as prescriptive analytics. In comparison, business intelligence, which is also known as descriptive analytics, describes a current or past state. An operations management professor at the University of Dayton, Ohio, Michael F. Gorman states that business intelligence does not tell you what needs to be done, but what has happened and what is happening.
Business Intelligence Providing Opportunities
Not every business opts for business Intelligence services since the planning, design and implementation process not only takes a lot of time, but requires a heavy amount of investment to make the system work to their advantage.
Business intelligence, also referred to as “BI” includes technologies and strategies used for effective data analysis, and to provide data insight as well as historical, up-to-date and predictive views of your operations. Not every decision coming out of a board meeting is made with 100% confidence, and this is due to the management being unable to get sufficient data for effective decision-making.
The scope of business intelligence has now been extended to include data integration and development of data warehouses. These and several other elements have become a part of the process of business intelligence to restructure business processes, reduce downtime and aid in an uninterrupted workflow.
Business Intelligence Services and Solutions
- BI Implementation and Integration
Agile strategies and best practices aid in integration and installation of several open-source BI platforms. This helps develop internal BI capabilities. BI implementation and integration includes customization, end-to-end BI solutions, design and deployment, data migration and maintenance, Hadoop implementation, etc.
- BI Consulting and Strategy
Businesses look for minimal risk and a variety of options. Critical business analytics and metrics, and eliminating wastage of time, money, and effort are some of the key features of BI consulting and strategy design. Other solutions include reporting and process optimization, data visualization assistance, implementation, integration, performance management, and others.
Some other business intelligence services include:
- Business Unit Optimization
- Trend and Brand Analysis
- Customer and Client Analysis
- Cost and Spend Analysis
- Business Performance Analysis
- Market Research
- Strategy and Forecasting
- Budgeting and Planning
- Financial Reporting
Business Intelligence and the Future
Traditional BI was used by IT professionals for in-house transactional data, and to produce reports whereas modern business intelligence is where business executives interact with intuitive, agile systems to analyze data quickly. Modern BI is increasingly used for gaining insight into fast changing dynamics of the market, such as advertising and promotion of events. Here, getting data faster is considered more valuable than getting it 100% right. As opposed to modern BI, classic BI is used more in financial and regulatory reporting where accuracy is the top priority. Here the data sets and questions used are predictable and standardized.
Self-service BI is emerging to be more important and in-demand so that the functions are not only of use for IT professionals, but also for business users. Self-service BI, however, still needs to be managed for policies, governance and accessibility so that the BI tools deliver what they are intended to deliver.
The global BI market and business intelligence services expect a compounded annual growth rate of over 10% by 2020, according to the Global Business Intelligence Market 2016-2020 report. Moreover, Gartner reports augmented analytics as machine learning in a software that will direct users with queries towards their required data, so it will be a combination of SMART BI and business analytics. Reporting is not enough, and if the core purpose of businesses today is just reporting, then they are already behind in the competition.
