# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For years, organizations adopted BI and analytics technologies to achieve greater efficiency from business intelligence. With BI accessibility still limited due to license restrictions or product fit, companies have not yet conquered these early goals.

Despite this, many organizations are moving ahead on a new wave of business intelligence initiatives focused on predicting where to best steer the business. Because the folks responsible for steering the company primarily work in marketing and product development, these departments will gain influence in prioritizing requirements and selecting BI products.

Therefore, it comes as no surprise that results from The BI Survey 16 indicate a broadening scope in the vision and goals for current business intelligence investments.

Though reporting and dashboard capabilities remain core staples of a BI portfolio, this rising wave of BI investments is aiming for exploration involving new data types and new sources, including integration within companies' commercial offerings. These product and market-driven projects need to extract insights so companies can outsmart the competition and over-deliver on product and service expectations.

Unlike traditional BI projects that mine internal data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and data warehouses, many of today's current BI projects taking place within sales and marketing require external data such as maps, social data, or even historical weather readings. Success in gaining new insights here requires BI software that allows functional users to bring new data sources together in different ways.

The chart below provides a snapshot of the solution areas where 2,220 survey respondents are applying their BI investment resources. One thing is clear: areas such as accounting and finance are more or less under control, so companies are moving to other parts of the enterprise and the top areas now involve gaining a better understanding of the customer, market, and competitive dynamics.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Benefits of Business Intelligence - 2,500 Projects Analyzed

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For years, organizations adopted BI and analytics technologies to achieve greater efficiency from business intelligence. With BI accessibility still limited due to license restrictions or product fit, companies have not yet conquered these early goals. Despite this, many organizations are moving ahead on a new wave of business intelligence initiatives focused on predicting where to best steer the business.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Leverage our business intelligence development services to unlock actionable insights, boost productivity and make data-driven business decisions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
For a company's operations to become informed by data, it will want to employ a business intelligence, or BI, strategy. BI tools allow an organization to make decisions that are guided not just by anecdote or a small collection of data, but with a complete picture of data. In this article, we will cover in detail what business intelligence means, how it can support a business, and what aspects to look for in business intelligence tools for your own organization.

What is business intelligence?

Business intelligence is the process of surfacing and analyzing data in an organization to make informed business decisions. BI covers a broad spectrum of technologies and methods, from the way that data is organized and analyzed, all the way to how findings are reported. BI is used to answer how a business performed in the past and why those outcomes came about.

Execution of a successful business intelligence strategy requires a strong organization of how data is used from start to finish:

Data collection: A business needs to understand where they can collect data from visitors and customers, and how they can be organized into a form that can be analyzed.

Data storage: Data relevant to businesses are numerous and often large in scope. In order to be useful, that data must be stored in a place that data stakeholders can reliably access, such as in a SQL database. A storage solution should always be up-to-date so that a company can act on changes in data quickly.

Data analysis: The core of business intelligence is focused on descriptive and diagnostic analytics, which answers questions of where your company has been, where it is now, and why things are the way they are now. BI tools need to be able to draw from data storage to conduct these different types of analyses.

Data reporting: All of our data and analyses will do no good if they do not reach decision makers and other stakeholders. BI should convey data and insights in ways that people with less context can still quickly understand and use them to make decisions.

In order to execute these steps, multiple tools and products need to be employed. There are two subsets of tools to consider here.

Data pipeline: data collection and storage

One class of tools are those used to collect and store data. Tools like Salesforce and Hubspot collect data on various aspects of a company's visitors. Products like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, and Snowflake allow businesses to store their data in scalable data warehouses. And other products like Fivetran and Stitch can make it easy to connect data generators into data storage.

While products that perform data collection and storage are important parts of the BI process, they generally aren't what people think of when it comes to business intelligence. The efforts put into this part of an organization's data strategy can serve not just their business intelligence needs, but other parts of their data analytics plans. Instead, the strategies used by a business to collect and store data are often known as the data pipeline. The tools used in the data pipeline will fall under the label of data engineering.

Business intelligence tools: data analysis and reporting

Other tools are used to analyze and report on data; these are the products that are referred to as business intelligence tools. Setting up these BI tools allow you to connect to and query data repositories in order to analyze the data. They let you create visualizations and dashboards that are easy to read and understand. Good BI tools let you generate and send out reports to stakeholders so they can monitor performance indicators at a high level.

Business intelligence vs. business analytics

The term "business analytics" (BA) is a term related to business intelligence, with plenty of confusion over where they overlap. A common distinction between business intelligence and business analytics comes from the type of data analysis being performed.

Business intelligence is often characterized as concerned with the descriptive and diagnostic levels of analysis. That is, BI tries to address questions of what has previously happened, what is the current state of things, and why the observed pattern in the metrics came to be.

Business analytics, on the other hand, is concerned with predictive and prescriptive analytics. This type of analysis is concerned with predicting what will happen next, or what a company should be doing next. Performing BA tends to be a more specialized pursuit, since it requires a good descriptive and diagnostic foundation that comes from BI.

While some definitions of BI and BA make distinctions between them based on analysis methods or strategies, the differences in domain between past and present vs. future are fairly standard. This separation between business intelligence and business analytics can help narrow down what kinds of functionality you want a BI tool to have, and what can be left out.

How business intelligence supports businesses

The overall objective of business intelligence is to allow a business to make informed decisions. A company with a working BI strategy will have data that is accurate, complete, and organized. Business intelligence can be used to show historic patterns to help stakeholders gauge the health of their organization, alerting them to problems as well as potential improvements.

Business intelligence can also help organize teams, keeping them aware of key performance indicators (KPIs). Awareness of KPIs through dashboards and reports keeps teams aligned and focused on their goals. Easy access to metrics and KPIs also frees up time and energy to execute on the tasks that will impact the company's performance.

Examples of business intelligence usage

Business intelligence tools can be used by all teams at a company, including sales, marketing, and customer support. Team members and executives can both make use of BI tools' output. Data engineers and data analysts can also make use of the convenience of a BI tool when performing their own investigations.

Examples of how business intelligence is used include:

Visualize the volume of visitors and users on a website over time

Track potential customers through a sales pipeline

Measure performance of business metrics against benchmarks and goals

Evaluate performance of marketing campaigns and experiments

Segment users by demographic characteristics

Generate reports for team and executive decision-making

Modern business intelligence and self-service BI

A major driving force behind modern business intelligence is increasing the accessibility of data analysis to a larger audience. Traditionally, calculation of metrics and compilation of reports required a dedicated data professional or team to create. This was a significant bottleneck between a user noticing an interesting or concerning trend and being able to diagnose their observations.

Now, business intelligence solutions are becoming aligned with self-service BI. With self-service BI, anyone is able to access data directly and perform analyses without needing to go directly through a data team member. Self-service BI tools typically have graphical interfaces so that common data tasks are easy to perform without query language knowledge. While data teams are still important for maintaining data and who gets access to it, self-service BI can free up data specialists to perform more intricate and advanced analyses.

Features of business intelligence software

In order to perform business intelligence tasks, we need data to be collected and stored with data engineering tools, then made available to business intelligence tools for analysis and reporting. When looking for solutions to let your business draw insights from your data, pay attention to the points below to make sure that they satisfy your needs.

Connections to data sources

First and foremost, you need to be able to get access to data in order to perform business intelligence. It's important to make sure that your analysis-side BI tool is able to connect to your other solutions that take care of data storage. These data sources can include databases like MySQL, data warehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery, or even ad hoc data files in CSV format. Make sure that your BI tool is also able to access the most up-to-date data in order to make timely decisions. Try to avoid workflows that require custom data pipelines to be set up, since this can create disruption if there is a change or unexpected event in the raw data.

Data querying

In addition to being able to connect to data sources, it is also worth checking how easily the BI tool is able to connect between data sources. A good BI tool will make it easy to take queries from different data sources and join them into a new one. Connecting and merging data from multiple data sources provides the opportunity for additional insights that are not possible on their own.

Data visualization and dashboards

Data visualization is a core component of most business intelligence applications. A good chart can convey insights faster than a plain table of numbers. When considering BI tools, see what kinds of charts they have available and the amount of customization possible with them. A surprisingly large amount can be done with a fairly small number of chart types, but think about your use case carefully to see if you need software that can support a particularly specialized chart type for your organization.

A BI tool should also be able to arrange groups of charts and tables into dashboards. Dashboards allow for continual tracking of important business metrics in a single location. Make sure that your chosen BI tool is able to automatically update its dashboards so that viewers are always getting the most up-to-date information possible.

Data analysis

It's important to keep in mind the type of analysis that can be handled by the data that is available. When there is an unexpected change in metrics, a BI tool should allow users to dig deeper into the data. A modern BI tool will allow users to modify and add on to previous queries in order to get deeper insights into the data. Another feature that supports analysis and exploration are dashboard-level filters that can affect multiple charts at the same time.

Recall as well that BI tends to be focused on descriptive and diagnostic analysis. While it might seem attractive for a BI tool to include more advanced capabilities such as machine learning or artificial intelligence, they are far from necessary. Making sense of these advanced techniques still requires specialized knowledge of the business and statistics to properly interpret what the algorithms find. A mature data team may well be better off performing predictive and prescriptive analyses outside of the bounds of BI tools' functionality.

Data availability

It's important to consider the freedom that business intelligence tools can provide to an organization. Modern BI tools can make it easier for data stakeholders to perform the investigations they need to themselves, freeing up data teams to perform more in-depth analyses.

Consider how easy it is for new users to be added to a BI tool and how easily they can access the data they need. Take note if there are different account types, if there are separate creator, editor, or viewer user accounts. Check if it is possible for multiple users to work collaboratively on the same dashboard.

Implementing a self-service BI tool can be a great way to drive an organization towards being data-driven. This is especially true for smaller businesses, which may not have the level of personnel to handle a more traditional BI strategy centered around a dedicated data team. When it is easier for users to get up to speed with a BI tool, the faster an organization can make use of and act on their data.

Deployment method

Another big consideration in choosing a business intelligence tool is how it will be deployed. Traditional BI software required an on-premises deployment, including hardware setup to software installation.

Modern business intelligence follows a cloud-based deployment model. Cloud-based BI tools require no specific hardware setup, sometimes just requiring an online connection. Since resources accessed remotely, a cloud-based BI strategy is quicker to get running and easier to scale with a company's data needs. It is now much easier to perform complex analyses due to this scalability. While on-premises deployment can have some small advantages with customizability, it will be in your best interests to stick with a cloud-based BI solution.

Application support

Each BI application has its own learning curve that can take some time to overcome. This can be an important consideration especially if you want many people actively using the software - including those who may not have much technical or analytical experience. Check to see what resources each BI tool has for using their product, like documentation, tutorials, and FAQs. Certain providers may also offer active support lines to provide direct help on specific customer questions.

Make an honest attempt at using a BI tool in a product trial in order to see if it suits your needs. Before and during a trial, plan out and try implementing some of your use cases in the product. Pay attention to not only whether the product's features actually solve your problem, but also where you get stuck and how the BI tool's support resources help you out. Other users will encounter those problems after purchasing the product, so knowing the kind of support you need should be a factor in choosing a BI tool.

Best practices for implementing business intelligence

Implementing business intelligence doesn't stop with just choosing the right tools: it also requires the proper support from the organization and its people. Keep in mind the following tips to ensure that when you invest in a BI strategy, the information it returns will be valuable to your company.

Ensure that the tool meets the company's needs

Before you purchase a BI tool, make sure that its capabilities actually act as solutions for the organization's questions before finalizing a commitment. Plan out how you expect the BI tool to be used by the company. Use the list of business intelligence features above to understand the priorities that you need in your BI strategy. Each BI tool provides tradeoffs between its features, so determine which features are most important for your business and select the tool that aligns best with your needs.

Establish a working data pipeline

Getting meaningful outputs from a BI tool requires meaningful inputs. Having a functional data pipeline for data collection and storage is a prerequisite to performing data analyses. When data is not clean, then it may be difficult to work with the data. If data is not thorough, then gaps in the data may result in bias in the results.

Make sure that your data is structured and organized before you start to analyze it. The people who manage the data will need to be in sync with what users need in order for analysis to be useful and actionable. Collecting data from many different sources and storing them in data lakes, warehouses, and marts can be a considerable effort in both time and money. Exercising good data management is a necessary step towards becoming data-informed, and work that you put in at the start can save you more pain later on.

Encourage active usage of business intelligence tools

It can take some effort to educate employees to use the BI tools you purchase. Education on proper tool use is necessary to ensure that users are drawing accurate insights from the data. However, while BI application interfaces have become more intuitive, learning how to work with a tool still requires patience.

It can help to have someone in charge of spearheading BI adoption efforts. Let them be an evangelist and leader to get more people engaged in using BI tools. Team leaders and executives can also provide valuable buy-in energy to support the building effort. When more people are using analysis tools, the more effective its implementation will be. Not only will more insights be generated, users can rely on each other to obtain the insights they need to perform informed decision making.

Conclusion

Business intelligence greatly enhances how a company approaches its decision-making by using data to answer questions of the company's past and present. It can be used by teams across an organization to track key metrics and organize on goals. Modern business intelligence tools use self-service solutions to make it easier for stakeholders to access their data and explore it for themselves.

When evaluating a BI tool, make sure it satisfies your company's needs in terms of:

Connections to data sources

How data can be queried and connected between data sources

Data visualizations and dashboards

Report generation

Depth of data analysis and drilldown

Accessibility of data

Help, documentation, and active application support

Business intelligence is a key investment to making a business more informed by data. When a BI tool is used in alignment with a business's use cases, it can free up time for employees to take meaningful actions to keep the business moving forward. For more perspectives, check out our whitepaper on how BI can benefit an organization and how to choose the right BI tool.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Role of Business Intelligence: What it Is and Why it Matters

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
For a company's operations to become informed by data, it will want to employ a business intelligence, or BI, strategy. BI tools allow an organization to make decisions that are guided not just by anecdote or a small collection of data, but with a complete picture of data.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The current digital age has transformed the way that things work across the board. But there is perhaps nowhere that it has made more of a difference than in the world of business. We now have tools that allow us to know more about our customers and business than ever before.

Of course, that's if you know where to find them and what to do with what you discover. The data is out there, as are the tools needed to access it, you just have to learn how to take advantage. This is why business intelligence is the key to an effective modern business strategy.

WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?

‍

Example of a Business Intelligence Dashboard

‍

‍

Here are just a few examples of insights and advantages that can be provided through business intelligence:

Senior Leadership

Give leadership the quick overview they need without pulling them into the weeds. Clearly visualize cash burn, pipeline, revenue, employee engagement, and more. Learn more about Executive BI dashboards here.

Operations

BI tools can help not only track budgets, but give visual insights into financial data, potential problem areas, and overall business health. Learn more about financial BI dashboards here.

Sales

BI can help improve sales KPIs drastically through visualizing the sales cycle, displaying conversion and churn rates, tracking the pipeline, total revenue, and more. Learn more about sales BI dashboards here.

Marketing

View all marketing KPIs in one place so you can track engagement and performance, as well as conversions, cost per lead, website traffic, and analytics. Learn more about marketing BI dashboards here.

WHY DOES BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MATTER?

‍

‍

HOW TO BEST TAKE ADVANTAGE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

So how do you access this information? There are a plethora of business intelligence tools now available that can help you to track relevant metrics. These have evolved from more old school methods like a simple spreadsheet, to more advanced solutions. And while a spreadsheet will do the job adequately, your use of data does not achieve its full potential without a more sophisticated BI tool.

A business intelligence platform like Grow will eliminate the need to manually gather, record, and organize your data. It will do everything for you: tracking and reporting relevant metrics; interpreting data in a more visual, easy-to-understand way; and collecting everything in a sleek dashboard that can be shared with your team, leadership, and stakeholders.

We are swimming in a sea of data. But only those with the tools to properly access and act on that data will be able to fully take advantage and see the benefits to their business. Those who do however, will be able to increase productivity, stay competitive, and enable the entire company to make faster, smarter decisions with the data collected.

To learn more about how you can start doing that right now and how BI can help your business, request a demo now.

‍

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What Is Business Intelligence and Why Is It Important? | Grow.com

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The current digital age has transformed the way that things work across the board. But there is perhaps nowhere that it has made more of a difference than in the world of business. We now have tools that allow us to know more about our customers and business than ever before.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Business intelligence definition

Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that inform an organization’s strategic and tactical business decisions. BI tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts and maps to provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.

The term business intelligence often also refers to a range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest access to insights about an organization’s current state, based on available data.

Business intelligence examples

Reporting is a central facet of business intelligence and the dashboard is perhaps the archetypical BI tool. Dashboards are hosted software applications that automatically pull together available data into charts and graphs that give a sense of the immediate state of the company.

Although business intelligence does not tell business users what to do or what will happen if they take a certain course, neither is BI solely about generating reports. Rather, BI offers a way for people to examine data to understand trends and derive insights by streamlining the effort needed to search for, merge and query the data necessary to make sound business decisions.

For example, a company that wants to better manage its supply chain needs BI capabilities to determine where delays are happening and where variabilities exist within the shipping process, says Chris Hagans, vice president of operations for WCI Consulting, a consultancy focused on BI. That company could also use its BI capabilities to discover which products are most commonly delayed or which modes of transportation are most often involved in delays.

The potential use cases for BI extend beyond the typical business performance metrics of improved sales and reduced costs, says Cindi Howson, research vice president at Gartner, an IT research and advisory firm. She points to the Columbus, Ohio, school system and its success using BI tools to examine numerous data points — from attendance rates to student performance — to improve student learning and high school graduate rates.

BI vendors Tableau and G2 also offer concrete examples of how organizations might put business intelligence tools to use:

A co-op organization could use BI to keep track of member acquisition and retention.

BI tools could automatically generate sales and delivery reports from CRM data.

A sales team could use BI to create a dashboard showing where each rep’s prospects are on the sales pipeline.

Business intelligence vs. business analytics

One thing you will have noticed from those examples is that they provide insights into the current state of the business or organization: where are sales prospects in the pipeline today? How many members have we lost or gained this month? This gets to the key distinction between business intelligence and another, related term, business analytics.

Business intelligence is descriptive, telling you what’s happening now and what happened in the past to get us to that state. Business analytics, on the other hand, is an umbrella term for data analysis techniques that are predictive — that is, they can tell you what’s going to happen in the future — and prescriptive — that is, they can tell you what you should be doing to create better outcomes. (Business analytics are usually thought of as that subset of the larger category of data analytics that’s specifically focused on business.)

The distinction between the descriptive powers of BI and the predictive or descriptive powers of business analytics goes a bit beyond just the timeframe we’re talking about. It also gets to the heart of the question of who business intelligence is for. As the Stitchdata blog explains, BI aims to deliver straightforward snapshots of the current state of affairs to business managers. While the predictions and advice derived from business analytics requires data science professionals to analyze and interpret, one of the goals of BI is that it should be easy for relatively non-technical end users to understand, and even to dive into the data and create new reports.

For more, see “Business intelligence vs. business analytics: Where BI fits in your data strategy.”

Business intelligence strategy

In the past, IT professionals had been the primary users of BI applications. However, BI tools have evolved to be more intuitive and user-friendly, enabling a large number of users across a variety of organizational domains to tap the tools.

Gartner’s Howson differentiates two types of BI. The first is traditional or classic BI, where IT professionals use in-house transactional data to generate reports. The second is modern BI, where business users interact with agile, intuitive systems to analyze data more quickly.

Howson explains that organizations generally opt for classic BI for certain types of reporting, such as regulatory or financial reports, where accuracy is paramount and the questions and data sets used are standard and predicable. Organizations typically use modern BI tools when business users need insight into quickly changing dynamics, such as marketing events, in which being fast is valued over getting the data 100 percent right.

But while solid business intelligence is essential to making strategic business decisions, many organizations struggle to implement effective BI strategies, thanks to poor data practices, tactical mistakes and more.

For more, see “7 keys to a successful business intelligence strategy” and “9 ways you’re failing at business intelligence.”

Self-service business intelligence

The drive to make it possible for just about anyone to get useful information out of business intelligence tools has given rise to self-service business intelligence, a category of BI tools aimed at abstracting away the need for IT intervention in generating reports. Self-service BI tools enable organizations to make the company’s internal data reports more readily available to managers and other nontechnical staff.

Among the keys to self-service BI success are business intelligence dashboards and UIs that include pull-down menus and intuitive drill-down points that allow users to find and transform data in easy-to-understand ways. A certain amount of training will no doubt be required, but if the advantages of the tools are obvious enough, employees will be eager to get on board. (If you’re shopping for a self-service BI solution, CIO.com’s Martin Heller walks you through the decision making process and compares his top five choices.)

Keep in mind, though, that there are pitfalls to self-service BI as well. By steering your business users into becoming ad hoc data engineers, you can end up with a chaotic mix of metrics that vary across departments, run into data security problems, and even run up big licensing or SaaS bills if there’s no centralized control over tool rollout. So even if you are committing to self-service business intelligence within your organization, you can’t just buy an off-the-shelf product, point your staff to the UI, and hope for the best.

Business intelligence software and systems

A variety of different types of tools fall under the business intelligence umbrella. The software selection service SelectHub breaks down some of the most important categories and features:

Dashboards

Visualizations

Reporting

Data mining

ETL (extract-transfer-load —tools that import data from one data store into another)

OLAP (online analytical processing)

Of these tools, SelectHub says the dashboards and visualization are by far the most popular; they offer the quick and easy-to-digest data summaries that are at the heart of BI’s value proposition.

There are tons of vendors and offerings in the BI space, and wading through them can get overwhelming. Some of the major players include:

Tableau, a self-service analytics platform provides data visualization and can integrate with a range of data sources, including Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Excel

Splunk, a “guided analytics platform” capable of providing enterprise-grade business intelligence and data analytics

Alteryx, which blends analytics from a range of sources to simplify workflows as well as provide a wealth of BI insights

Qlik, which is grounded in data visualization, BI and analytics, providing an extensive, scalable BI platform

Domo, a cloud-based platform that offers business intelligence tools tailored to various industries (such as financial services, health care, manufacturing and education) and roles (including CEOs, sales, BI professionals and IT workers)

Dundas BI, which is mostly used for creating dashboards and scorecards, but can also do standard and ad-hoc reporting

Google Data Studio, a supercharged version of the familiar Google Analytics offering

Einstein Analytics, Salesforce.com’s attempt to improve BI with AI

Birst, a cloud-based service in which multilple instances of the BI software share a common data backend.

For a deeper look at today’s most popular business intelligence systems, see “Top 12 BI tools of 2019” and “Top 10 BI data visualization tools.”

Any company that’s serious about BI will need to have business intelligence analysts on staff. CIO.com has an in-depth article on what that job entails; in general, they aim to use all the features of BI tools to get the data that companies need, the most important being discovering areas of revenue loss and identifying where improvements can be made to save the company money or increase profits.

Even if your company relies on self-service BI tools on a day-to-day basis, business intelligence analysts have an important role to play, as they are necessary for managing and maintaining those tools and their vendors. They also set up and standardize the reports that managers are going to be generating to make sure that results are consistent and meaningful across your organization. And to avoid garbage in/garbage out problems, business intelligence analysts need to make sure the data going into the system is correct and consistent, which often involves getting it out of other data stores and cleaning it up.

Business intelligence analyst jobs often require only a bachelor’s degree, at least at the entry level, though to advance up the ranks an MBA may be helpful or even required. As of October 2019, the median business intelligence salary is around $67,500, though depending on your employer that could range from $49,000 to $94,000.

The future of business intelligence

Moving ahead, Howson says Gartner sees a third wave of disruption on the horizon, something the research firm calls “augmented analytics,” where machine learning is baked into the software and will guide users on their queries into the data.

“It will be BI and analytics, and it will be smart,” she says.

The combinations included in these software platforms will make each function more powerful individually and more valuable to the businesspeople using them, Gorman says.

“Someone will look at reports from, for example, last year’s sales — that’s BI — but they’ll also get predictions about next year’s sales — that’s business analytics — and then add to that a what-if capability: What would happen if we did X instead of Y,” Gorman says, explaining that software makers are moving to develop applications that will provide those functions within a single application rather than delivering them via multiple platforms as is now the case.

“Now the system delivers higher-value recommendations. It makes the decision-maker more efficient, more powerful and more accurate,” he adds.

And although BI will remain valuable in and of itself, Howson says organizations can’t compete if they’re not moving beyond only BI and adopting advanced analytics as well.

In fact, Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report predicts that by 2020 organizations offering “users access to a curated catalog of internal and external data will realize twice the business value from analytics investments than those that do not.”

Howson adds: “There is a need for reporting, but reporting alone is not enough. If you’re only doing reporting you’re behind already. Unless your reporting is smart and agile, you’re behind. You’re a laggard.”

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What is business intelligence? Transforming data into business insights

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that inform an organization’s business decisions.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
You’ve probably heard the saying, “work smarter, not harder.” That turn of phrase might as well have been invented for business intelligence tools. Business intelligence software (BI) comprises a range of data analytics tools that analyze and manage data related to your business operations. Some of the benefits of business intelligence software’s rich visualization capabilities allow businesses to monitor sales, logistics and even productivity.

Get our BI Tools Requirements Template

It also provides extensive data analysis using rich, intuitive reports. By presenting your data in an easy-to-understand format, BI software helps you understand your business’s strengths and weaknesses while providing actionable insights into KPIs and other important metrics. This visibility makes it a critical tool to ensure competitiveness and profitability.

This Article Covers:

How does Business Intelligence Work?

Benefits

Get Valuable Insights into Your Business

Visualize Important Information

Perform Data Mining

Establish Benchmarking

Leverage Performance Management

Access Sales Intelligence

Streamline and Trim Operations

Eliminate Guesswork

Improve Inventory Management

Get a Competitive Edge

Increase Operational Efficiency

Boost Customer Satisfaction

Streamline Competitive Analysis

Boost Access to Critical Information

Make Data-Driven Decisions

How Does Business Intelligence Work?

Most organizations store data in different formats and locations. They can’t unify these data sources in a common, centralized format and use them for analysis. This is where BI tools come in handy. They combine data from multiple sources, including CRM, ERP and supply chain management solutions, while creating complex reports without IT team assistance.

Reports provide an in-depth view of business performance and support planning. Ad hoc reports give you valuable insights to boost decision-making, identify issues, gauge market trends and find new opportunities.

There are numerous reasons why companies invest in BI solutions. Some organizations leverage BI tools to gain insights into consumer buying patterns, while others want to improve employee engagement and productivity.

Here are 15 key operational benefits of business intelligence:

1. Get Valuable Insights into Your Business

Business intelligence software constantly collects and analyzes data to deliver actionable insights. Professionals can generate reports on a variety of data sets like expenses, operations processes, staffing and customer service.

There are numerous types of reports you can create using BI tools. All BI platforms will offer pre-formatted reporting capabilities that collect data for common KPIs. Businesses can also generate customized or self-service BI reports, applying BI’s excellent visuals to unique, organization-specific data sets.

Suppose neither of these options give you what you need. Instead, you can run an ad hoc report, which is put together entirely by users and usually focuses on a very specific KPI that other types of reports can’t target.

Another unique benefit of BI reports is information relevance. Because reports contain relevant data from your business operations, you can act with confidence. Plus, you don’t have to be a data scientist to use BI tools — the data visualizations these tools generate are easy to understand and explain.

In SelectHub’s survey of organizations in the market for BI software, 48% of buyers listed reporting as a desired feature.

Create reports in real time to monitor KPIs using different data sources, including customer, financial, operations and sales data. You can also access report templates that include easy-to-read visualizations like graphs, charts, tables and more. Interactive reports let you drill down deeper to fetch granular details and make informed decisions.

Eliminate the Risks of Selecting the Wrong Software with SelectHub

2. Visualize Important Information

Operational reports can be difficult to interpret, reducing an organization’s ability to recognize and act on key metrics. One of the key advantages of business intelligence software is its excellent data visualization capabilities that let you create intuitive, easy-to-digest visuals.

SAS BI offers powerful data visualization capabilities.

Charts, graphs, videos, animations and infographics are more engaging ways to transmit information than blocks of numbers or spreadsheets. This is partly because the human brain is hardwired to process cognitive information — information that takes more than a glance to interpret and digest — much slower than visual information. Of those surveyed in SelectHub’s survey, 81% of respondents expected visualization features from their BI platform.

3. Perform Data Mining

BI analytics tools are exceptionally well-suited for powerful data mining. Data mining is the process of seeking data patterns to identify trends and draw insights. It breaks down into five steps: collection, warehousing and storage, organization, analysis and presentation. Some BI platforms can perform all of these steps, although others require support from business analytics tools, big data analytics systems or data warehousing platforms.

BI analyzes, processes and renders vast amounts of data that are impossible to manage with weaker programs. It integrates with data warehousing solutions, in-house databases (e.g. SQL servers), as well as both structured and unstructured data. This strategy offers access to valuable information and enhanced decision-making processes that businesses might otherwise miss.

Because BI software can instantaneously analyze incoming data, it helps companies catch fleeting opportunities that they might otherwise miss. With the customizable reports produced by connecting BI to a data warehouse, companies can pick up on trends in company spending, staffing, operations, client development and more.

4. Establish Benchmarking

Fast thinking and effective decision-making are important in achieving success in a business endeavor. Often, those in charge of running a business don’t have time to conduct a large-scale research project or product release. Using business intelligence software is like constantly having an in-depth research project in progress that’s compiling information for groundbreaking decision-making.

Benchmarking is a valuable data analysis tool businesses use to gauge their productivity, revenue and overall success relative to their competitors. Organizations often struggle with benchmarking, but BI simplifies the process, providing actionable information and easy-to-understand reports. That’s why benchmarking is one of the core BI requirements users look for in a BI platform.

Benchmarking reports offer accurate, timely data that allow businesses to evaluate their performance against individual KPIs or trends over time, providing valuable insight into the organization’s current state. With predictive analytics capabilities, you can take these benchmarks and implement them proactively, getting ahead of the competition instead of chasing behind them.

5. Leverage Performance Management

BI tracks, manages and implements performance goals. With BI tools, businesses can input data-based goals such as sales goals or target delivery time, then track progress on a daily basis. This tracking mechanism is known as performance management, and it provides some of the most effective and easily implemented goal management available.

BI applications make information readily accessible that would ordinarily take hours or weeks to track down and organize. Business intelligence dashboards and real-time data allow you to organize important information and get moment-to-moment updates. It saves time and lets you deal with problems immediately.

With BI’s intuitive visual analytics capabilities, professionals can track goal fulfillment and use that information to gauge overall organizational productivity. When properly implemented, BI tools can boost your performance significantly.

Compare Business Intelligence Software Leaders

6. Access Sales Intelligence

One of the most important BI benefits is that it enhances awareness. People who design business intelligence software know companies can’t take advantage of opportunities they miss. Instead, they design software to make those fleeting opportunities noticeable and provide the details that allow companies to make the most of them.

A sales analytics dashboard from Domo BI.

Reports that business intelligence systems produce are viable when you need to back up your claims with hard data. They can also help make quick sales decisions with real-time data and mobile BI reports.

When it comes to sales, this type of software isn’t only effective at supporting your arguments. It also helps you identify trends in customer preferences, so you’ll be the first in your industry to know what to offer customers. Plus, nothing tops off a pitch like a beautiful data visualization — BI has your back.

7. Streamline and Trim Operations

A lesser-praised business intelligence benefit is its ability to cut down waste: this includes operational and administrative work that can be automated with a BI system. BI does the work that data entry employees or data analysts would typically get saddled with, like data organization, de-duplication and other repetitive tasks.

This has a number of benefits: first, employees can devote their time to more intensive tasks, increasing productivity. It can also save time and money while reducing human error. It also allows you to identify how well the organization is doing with the current staff so you can grow or downsize accordingly.

BI systems can identify waste in your operations by pinpointing pain points, bottlenecks and inefficiencies in manufacturing, operations and sales. With predictive analytics, BI will even offer suggestions to alleviate these problem areas.

8. Eliminate Guesswork

Without business intelligence software, companies have to gamble when making important decisions regarding management, finances and marketing efforts. With these tools in place, the decisions made by company leaders are more data-driven and often result in a competitive advantage for your organization.

BI implements a data structure to encourage data-driven decision-making and helps you know the best plan — not just guess at it. This business resource will not only lead to greater profitability, but it will take a great deal of the stress and uncertainty out of running a business.

9. Improve Inventory Management

Business intelligence tools can extend into purchasing, procurement and inventory management. You can generate reports detailing stockroom needs to determine when to purchase new inventory. BI also tracks outgoing inventory, so you can prepare for future buying trends and reduce inventory waste.

Streamline Software Selection with Services

10. Gain a Competitive Edge

The number of businesses utilizing BI is only increasing. According to MarketsandMarkets, the global business intelligence market is predicted to expand from $23.1 billion in 2020 to $33.3 billion by 2025, with a 7.6% CAGR. It’s not unreasonable to predict that in the next 10 to 20 years BI adoption will be the norm. This thought is especially true as the BI market gains increasing pervasiveness and traction. The future is bright for BI.

Business intelligence gives organizations a tangible competitive edge in an increasingly competitive market. Making quick decisions in the business world is part of the job, but knowing those decisions are based soundly on data-driven insights offers another level of security and confidence.

Predictive modelling from SAS.

BI even offers fraud monitoring and risk management features. By tracking patterns and monitoring data behavior, BI can identify how likely it is that a transaction, person or network is fraudulent. The same data mining feature that gives sales teams insight into customer desires can make risk assessments and predictions, protecting your organization.

11. Increase Operational Efficiency

BI tools let you access and analyze data from multiple sources to gain a holistic view of business operations. This view makes it possible to identify areas for improvement and new business opportunities. When organizations spend a few hours analyzing, they can utilize their time to innovate and increase profits.

12. Boost Customer Satisfaction

BI tools empower you to gauge customer behaviors, buying preferences and trends that can directly impact customer experiences and satisfaction. Most organizations accumulate customer feedback in real time that helps retain existing customers and reach out to new ones.

13. Streamline Competitive Analysis

Track competitors’ sales and marketing performance to learn how they differ from your business. Furthermore, leveraging BI tools for budgeting, forecasting and planning provides a competitive advantage.

14. Access to Critical Information

With the huge amount of information generated every second, accessing the right information at a particular time can be challenging. BI systems offer visualization capabilities to provide a better understanding of historical and present data, real-time updates, forecasts and trends.

It allows you to access key business metrics through dashboards and reports available on mobile devices and tablets. Extract crucial marketing and sales information rapidly, gauge trends and patterns, and decide on appropriate actions.

15. Make Data-Driven Decisions

Analyze data from business departments, including sales, marketing, operations, human resources and more to get actionable insights. Spend less time creating reports and dashboards and more time conducting analysis to drive effective business decisions.

Compare BI Software Leaders

Final Thoughts

There are a range of benefits of business intelligence software. It is a growing industry that has many proven advantages when properly implemented. It allows you to gain targeted insight into your organization’s past, present and future to make informed business decisions. To accomplish this, BI software collects, organizes, mines and visualizes crucial KPIs.

It eliminates waste and guesswork, promotes efficient inventory management and improves sales intelligence. The powerful combination of features and benefits of BI software provides a competitive edge that can make all the difference.

What is the greatest advantage you’ve gained from utilizing the benefits of BI? Let us know in the comments!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Top Benefits of Business Intelligence for 2022

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
You’ve probably heard the saying, “work smarter, not harder.” That turn of phrase might as well have been invented for business intelligence tools. Business intelligence software (BI) comprises a range of data analytics tools that analyze and manage data related to your business operations. Some of…

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are living in the age of technological progression. Digital advancements have completely revolutionized our everyday lives, and one of the largest impacts felt has been in the business world. Companies now have access to data-driven tools and strategies that allow them to learn more about their customers and themselves than ever before, but not everyone is taking advantage of them. Today we're going to breakdown Business Intelligence and why it's crucial to the success and longevity of your organization.

‍

What Is Business Intelligence?

Before we jump into the importance, we must first understand Business Intelligence and how it applies to your company's strategic initiatives. The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the technologies, applications, strategies, and practices used to collect, analyze, integrate, and present pertinent business information. The entire purpose of Business Intelligence is to support and facilitate better business decisions. BI allows organizations access to information that is critical to the success of multiple areas including sales, finance, marketing, and a multitude of other areas and departments. Effectively leveraging BI will empower your business with increased actionable data, provide great insights into industry trends, and facilitate a more strategically geared decision-making model.

To illustrate BI in action, here are a few departmental specific examples of insights and benefits that can come from its adoption and application:

Human Resources: HR can tremendously benefit from the implementation of Business Intelligence utilizing employee productivity analysis, compensation and payroll tracking, and insights into employee satisfaction.

Finance: Business Intelligence can help finance departments by providing invaluable and in-depth insights into financial data. The application of BI can also help to track quarterly and annual budgets, identify potential problem areas before they cause any negative impacts, and improve the overall organizational business health and financial stability.

Sales: Business Intelligence can assist your company's sales force by providing visualizations of the sales cycle, in-depth conversion rates analytics, as well as total revenue analysis. BI can help your sales team to identify what's working as well as points of failure which can result in dramatically improved sales performance.

Marketing: BI provides the marketing department with a convenient way to view all current and past campaigns, the performance and trends of those campaigns, a breakdown of the cost per lead and the return on investment, site traffic analytics, as well as a multitude of other actionable pieces of information.

Executive Leadership: Plain and simple, Business Intelligence allows organizations to reduce costs by improving efficiency and productivity, improving sales, and revealing opportunities for continuous improvement. Business Intelligence allows members of Executive Leadership to more easily measure the organization's pulse by removing gray areas and eliminating the need to play the guessing game on how the company is doing.

‍

Why Is Business Intelligence Important?

Now you know what Business Intelligence is, what it's capable of, but the question remains; why is Business Intelligence so important to modern-day organizations? The main reasons to invest in a solid BI strategy and system are:

Gain New Customer Insights: One of the primary reasons companies are investing their time, money, and efforts into Business Intelligence is because it gives them a greater ability to observe and analyze current customer buying trends. Once you utilize BI to understand what your consumers are buying and the buying motive, you can use this information to create products and product improvements to meet their expectations and needs and, as a result, improve your organization's bottom-line.

Improved Visibility: Business Intelligent organizations have better control over their processes and standard operating procedures, as the visibility of these functions is improved by a BI system. The days of skimming through hundreds of pages of annual reports to assess performance are long gone. Business Intelligence illuminates all areas of your organization helps you to readily identify areas for improvement and allow you to be prepared instead of reactive.

Actionable Information: An effective Business Intelligence system serves as a means to identify key organizational patterns and trends. A BI system also allows you to understand the implications of various organizational processes and changes, allowing you to make informed decisions and act accordingly.

Efficiency Improvements: BI Systems help improve organizational efficiency which consequently increases productivity and can potentially increase revenue. Business Intelligence systems allow businesses to share vital information across departments with ease, saving time on reporting, data extraction, and data interpretation. Making the sharing of information easier and more efficient permits organizations to eliminate redundant roles and duties, allowing the employees to focus on their work instead of focusing on processing data.

Sales Insight: Sales and marketing teams alike want to keep track of their customers, and most utilize Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application to do so. CRMs are designed to handle all interactions with customers. Because they house all customer communications and interactions, there is a wealth of data and information that can be interpreted and used to strategic initiatives. BI systems help organizations with everything from identifying new customers, tracking and retaining existing ones, and providing post-sale services.

Real-Time Data: When executives and decision-makers have to wait for reports to be compiled by various departments, the data is prone to human error and is at risk of being outdated before it's even submitted for review. BI systems provide users with access to data in real-time through various means including spreadsheets, visual dashboards, and scheduled emails. Large amounts can be assimilated, interpreted, and distributed quickly and accurately when leveraging Business Intelligence tools.

Competitive Advantage: In addition to all of these great benefits, Business Intelligence can help you gain insight into what your competitors are doing, allowing your organization to make educated decisions and plan for future endeavors.

‍

In summary, BI makes it possible to combine data from multiple sources, analyze the information into a digested format, and then disseminate the information to relevant stakeholders. This allows companies to see the big picture and make smart business decisions. There are always inherent risks when it comes to making any business decision, but those risks aren't as prominent or worrisome when implementing an effective and reliable BI solution. Business Intelligent organizations can move forward in an increasingly data-driven climate with confidence knowing they are prepared for any challenge that arises.

The Analytiks team is here to improve your organization's efficiency by leveraging your existing data. We will provide you with the tools your business needs to transform complex, unorganized, and confusing data into clear and actionable insights. This helps to speed your decision-making processes and ensures that all your business decisions are educated and backed with reliable data, and lots of it! Get in touch with the Analytiks team today to see how we can improve your business!

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Why Business Intelligence is Important We are living in the age of technological progression. Digital advancements have completely revolutionized our everyday lives, and one of the largest impacts felt has been in the business world.