In today’s data driven world, the role of business intelligence has become increasingly vital for organizations that want to improve their business decisions and gain insights of their operations. By leveraging the top business intelligence tools available in the market, businesses should be able to uncover valuable insights and transform raw data into powerful assets.
The role of business intelligence is to enhance an organization’s operations by leveraging relevant data. BI plays a vital role in driving success and ensuring competitiveness in today’s dynamic business landscape by empowering organizations to make informed decisions based on data-driven intelligence.
Without BI, employees and senior executives would be forced to rely on alternative factors like prior experiences, intuition, gut feelings, or collected knowledge in order to successfully guide their daily actions. While these techniques occasionally assist you in making wise business decisions, they are inefficient and risky.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) involves a range of technologies, processes, and tools that empower organizations to collect, store, and analyze data to better understand the business by gaining insights of their daily operations. The ultimate goal of BI is to help organizations drive more informed business decisions based on their most valuable asset.
It starts by collecting data from different sources such as websites, internal and external databases, systems, and so on. After that, the information is sliced and diced using a variety of tools to read from different digital repositories to visually identify patterns, trends, and relationships.
Importance of Business Intelligence
Businesses are investing heavily in technologies related to data analysis with the ultimate goal of identifying new opportunities to help them get an edge over their competitors. It allows organizations to gain deeper insights of their operations, customer behavior, and areas of improvements which empowers them to make data-driven decisions that can enhance efficiency and stimulate growth.
Organizations leave 97% of gathered data unused
As per these statistics, BI still did not get the mass usage that it deserves. It could be for different factors including the heavy investment at the early stage from technologies, hardware, skilled employees, and so on. The purpose of BI and the positive impact of successful implementation should put it on the track of mass adoption.
How business intelligence works?
Business intelligence gives organizations the ability to ask simple to complex questions and get accurate answers based on their collected data. It provides a holistic view of how the business is operating in different sections and identifies patterns to improve sales, customer experience, or supply chain.
It consists of several components that organizations need to clearly understand how they work together to maximize its benefits and control the full BI cycle. The process involves collecting and storing high quality data from different available sources such as databases, systems, and documentations. This data is then transformed into a format that is suitable for analysis.
When we have completed the transformation of our data into a structured format, powerful analytical tools and techniques will then be applied to identify patterns and gain insights. Implementing BI guidelines will give you the ability to address related challenges considerably fast to achieve a smooth and efficient implementation.
At the end of the day, part of our job is to create interactive dashboards with the available data that can be used and customized without any IT skills. This advanced visualization will give high management better understand their data and be able to react proactively to changes and severe circumstances.
Remember, the role of business intelligence is to make it easier for stakeholders to interpret and understand the available data with minimum efforts to make the most suitable business decisions based on collected data.
Examples of business intelligence usage
Adopting BI provides multiple ways for your organization to strive specially in this digital age. Here are some examples of how different departments can use BI:
1- Sales and marketing department:
- Ability to identify customer segments which was profitable for the organization and create a customized marketing campaigns.
- Deeply analyze sales related data to better understand customer behavior, preferences, and different buying patterns.
- Identify which areas of the sales process that need improvement.
- Intelligently identify potential sales opportunities.
2- Finance and accounting department:
- Find ways to save costs and improve financial procedures.
- Deep financial analysis using generated dashboards and reports
- Keep track of important financial data including sales, costs, and profitability.
- Discover and prevent fraud or financial irregularities.
- Forecast future financial performance based on historical data
3- Human resources department
- Analyze employee data to identify potential turnover risks.
- Optimize workforce planning and resource allocation.
- Monitor employee performance metrics and identify areas for improvement.
- Track employee satisfaction and engagement levels to identify potential issues.
- Conduct talent acquisition analysis to optimize recruitment processes and reduce time-to-hire.
4- Customer service department:
- Analyze customer service data to identify areas for improvement in service quality.
- Monitor and track customer satisfaction metrics to ensure high-quality customer service.
- Identify common customer issues and provide proactive solutions.
- Analyze customer feedback and sentiment to improve products or services.
