Today, companies are embracing BI Analytics Services to make their IT solutions more vigorous, easy to access, and efficient. With Cloud-based BI solutions, organizations, irrespective of their size, can raise their standards of competency and worth. In 2018, the global BI software market was valued at $14.3 billion and predicted to rise at 19.1% CAGR to $28.77 billion by 2022.
Business intelligence enables small, medium, and large organizations to improve their decision-making by accessing big data. Even small companies that don’t generate and manage large data can benefit substantially from enhanced analytics.
At first, only large businesses could afford the cost of BI analytics due to the software cost and the infrastructure required to process it. However, the latest technological innovations, such as Software as a Service (SaaS), which works on a cloud computing platform, have raised the standards. Today, even startup firms with sales below $100,000 annually can exploit and benefit from BI.
Implementing business intelligence and analytics efficiently is a critical point of difference between companies that thrive and companies that sink in the modern environment. That’s because things are continually changing and getting more competitive in every business segment, and leveraging the power of BI is key to outshining your competitors.
For example, for marketing, traditional advertising methods of spending huge amounts of money on TV, radio, and print ads without considering ROI are not as effective as they used to be. Consumers have become smart and more resistant to advertisements that aren’t targeted directly at them.
Successful marketing companies in both B2C and B2B use data and research to formulate hyper-specific campaigns that reach out to targeted customers with a customized message. Companies test everything and then they put more money into successful campaigns while the other campaigns remain idle.
Why Is Business Intelligence Analytics So Important?
The main functionality of business intelligence and analytics is to help business teams, managers, top executives, and other employees make better-informed decisions based on accurate data. It will eventually help them identify new business opportunities, trim down costs, and recognize ineffective processes that need to be engineered again.
BI analytics uses software and algorithms to derive valuable insights from a company’s data and direct its strategic decisions. BI users evaluate and represent data in the form of business intelligence dashboards and reports, visualizing compound information in a simpler, more amicable, and logical way. Finally, business intelligence and analytics are much more than the technology used to collect and analyze data.
Top Benefits of BI Analytics
The benefits of business intelligence and analytics are abundant and diverse, but they have one thing in common, they give you the power of knowledge. Whoever they influence, can convert your organization and the way you handle your business profoundly. Here is an overview of the top six benefits of business intelligence:
- Understand your customers more efficiently
- Drive performance and revenue
- You can rate leads
- Spot sales trends
- Easily present tailored service experience
- Enhance operational effectiveness
How Does Business Intelligence Work?
Business intelligence presents a scale of a wide range of analytical applications, comprising collaborative BI, mobile BI, open-source BI, SaaS BI, real-time BI, and operational BI. The technology is not only about collecting intelligence but about forming a sense of data in a way that can be rapidly seized.
It is possible through visualization applications for making infographics and design charts. BI also provides dashboards and also presents performance scorecards. In essence, you can understand the key performance indicators and business metrics in a much easier way when the data is displayed in the form of visualizations.
How BI Analytics Services Support Your Business?
Many small businesses are reluctant to implement BI into their practices. It is not just because it is costly and time-consuming to install but, because they are not sure about the profits they can gain by using it. Here are a few reasons why it can reimburse its value:
- It’s much easier to make well-versed data-driven decisions.
- It’s a structured way of increasing revenue.
- It augments the competitive benefit over other leaders in the industry, including bigger organizations.
- It enhances the competence of its business operations.
- It improves the quality of their customer service.
These benefits are the key factors that decide the success and prosperity of any business. Making efforts to analyze data without Business Intelligence and Analytics is clumsy. For example, information is often fed into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, which is time-consuming in aspects of data collection and it’s tedious to put the information together in a way that’s easy to grab, analyze, and share.
If you fail to analyze data, it can result in the difference between profit and loss or between a humble profit and offensive success. These are the two major things that can occur when analytics are done properly:
- You can discover insights into industry trends and identify marketing opportunities that you could have otherwise missed.
- You get to know what customers want and demand from your company and this information can assist you in redesigning your business to obtain more customers.
Data Literacy in Today’s Digital Age
It’s hard to find a business that isn’t driven by correct data. Data is growing at lightning speed. Regrettably, smart business executives don’t always have sufficiently skilled workers to make sense of the constantly rising data- nor do they have the right tools they need to collect this data competently and extract it for insights.
Efficient data-driven operations that run across an organization can present a differentiating factor. It’s not easy to understand risk rapidly because the existing data is often incorrect. As an effect, a company can fail to choose smarter options and improve its bottom line. It’s hypothetically possible that a company can have high data literacy without Business Intelligence which is much harder.
Leading to ROI with Business Intelligence Analytics
Business intelligence is key to managing business trends, spotting significant events, and viewing the full image of what’s happening within your organization due to data. It is vital to optimize various operations, boost operational efficiency, gain new revenue, and make the decision-making process better for the company.
You’re living in the most competitive business market in history. Progression in technologies and a worldwide economy have mutually created a force of competition in the market, with weaker companies being buried in the crowd.
Considering the current situation, an organization can’t thrive without using BI tools. Particularly after examining some case studies, which have shown the unbelievable ROI that is only possible by using them and the endless benefits of business analytics. This ROI gained from business intelligence can come in various forms.
You have to understand what’s going on in the minds of your customers who can be your next best customers and how to collaborate with them in the most efficient ways. You can get answers to all these questions from the available data, which can be processed by implementing BI and analytics tools. However, you need to be aware of any indiscretion and don’t forget to consider some business intelligence best practices and some detrimental practices to stay away from!
How Can You Successfully Implement Business Intelligence?
A highly modified, customer-driven approach has ended up in a modern business approach, which needs a business analysis with definite metrics. Hence, a business intelligence strategy is essential for all organizations today.
If you implement Business intelligence properly, it can provide you with a correct analysis that can help you to speed up and develop your business. It can help you to evaluate the customer acquisition cost, customer purchasing patterns, and cycles, and help you to make informed decisions based on that analysis.
An appropriate business intelligence execution will not only help you know your customers better but, it will also help you to increase your sales multiple times.
So, what are the steps you should pursue a successful business implementation strategy? Here are a few key steps for deploying business intelligence within your organization.
Training the Staff & Stakeholders
It is human nature to oppose change and the first step to reducing the resistance is through training. You can teach and educate the staff & stakeholders, which requires immense effort as it would need an exceptional amount of expenses from the stakeholders’ viewpoint and shift to new technology from the staff’s point of view.
Identify the Objectives
The second thing to do for a successful BI Analytics is to identify the objectives you want to achieve through a business intelligence system. Having set up objectives will not only help your partners to recognize the expectations from the tool, but it will also assist you in strategizing the plan of action simply.
Set Up Key Performance Indicators
When you have defined the goals to set up a business intelligence system, the next step is to describe the key performance indicators (KPIs) clearly. They will help you to make helpful decisions to attain your objectives. These indicators should be assessable in line with your objectives and the key to accomplishing your goals.
Create a Team
Next, you have to create a team of people who will carry out tasks such as data cleansing, data input, data processing, and data analytics. It is one of the most crucial steps for a successful implementation of BI analytics, as this team will be the one to execute the ideas.
Discover the Best Software
The next step in the process of implementation is to discover the most suitable software that can perform all tasks within your organization. You also have to find out various options for software available for every task. The variety of tools will change depending on the requirement and budget. But, you need to understand the optimal tool required for all processes.
Develop an Execution Strategy
Once you have gathered your team, resources, and software, you need to concentrate on the implementation strategy for the successful implementation process of BI and analytics. It involves understanding whether you require a Top-Down Approach which is more of a strategic method or a Bottom-Up Approach, which is more of a tactical method.
Identify the Tasks & Allot the Resources
After creating a team, selecting software, and a suitable strategy of execution, you need to describe the tasks that the teams will perform. Then, you need to hand over the tasks to the related teams and assign the resources to complete the task.
Build the Data Cleansing, Data Processing, and Data Analysis Processes
Now when you have all the tools, strategies, and the team in your place, you have to generate a data cleansing process with the selected tool. There is a vast amount of data that is deficient in the quality to obtain your goals and you need to clean up this useless database and produce a high-quality database.
You also have to make sure that there are checkpoints to estimate the data quality at set intervals. Having an efficient data cleansing process improves your chances of attaining your goals. Then, you have to integrate the BI analytics tools, such as Microsoft Power BI, Cognos, or Tableau to be aware of the user behavior insights.
Execute the Process as a Proof of Concept
After completing all this, you have to execute them for a single process as a proof of concept. Once you have enough data to recognize the impact of BI on your business, then this approach will help you evaluate whether you are meeting the KPIs or where areas need to improve.
Implement the Changes to Meet the KPIs
When you have executed the changes based on the insights derived from the Proof of Concept, you can run another PoC to recognize how much difference you have covered between the outcomes of these two PoC. It must be a regular process, and it requires optimization at every stage. It is recommended to try some proof of concepts and analyze their results.
If you want to stay away from all the hassles you experience in implementing BI by yourself and analytics tools – you can hire professional BI Analytics Services that will do it all for you! ExistBI has offices in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe.
