Today's digital age has transformed the way businesses function and work across the board. But there is nowhere that has made more of a difference than in the business world. New and innovative tools allow them to know more about their customers and business than ever before.
With data out there, along with the tools required to access it, businesses just must learn to take advantage of the opportunities. This is the reason why business intelligence is emerging as the key to an effective modern business strategy.
Business Intelligence - Introduction
Business intelligence (BI) is a subdiscipline of data analytics that integrates gathering, analyzing, and presenting data visually. Business intelligence helps to improve business decision-making by making data more accessible to interpret and act on. A key component in business intelligence is the underlying technology, as well as the ability to create business intelligence dashboards. With the right business intelligence (BI) solutions, businesses can reveal more actionable data, generate clear insights, and facilitate strategic decision-making.
While business intelligence involves collecting and visualizing data, it also refers to the software tools that help in undertaking these practices. These tools assist with data reports by pulling them from a central dashboard and creating reports and visualizations such as charts and graphs. Business intelligence uses data to gather insights regarding an organization’s present-day strategy.
Business Intelligence Tools - Importance
Organizations integrate business intelligence tools to enhance their operational strategies as well as execution. By gathering data in a single environment, they can extract critical insights faster and make decisions more efficiently. Business intelligence tools enable companies to:
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Collect and store data to mine data for patterns that will inform visualizations.
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Maximize workflow efficiency to extract better insights, which further leads to better decision-making.
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Reach business objectives and goals by measuring performance and benchmarking processes.
Read more: Data Analytics Tools and Software in 2023 - Comprehensive Guide
Understanding Business Intelligence Tools & Software
Business Intelligence (BI) tools are proprietary as well as open-source applications that are integrated by businesses to collect, process, analyze, filter, and report large quantities of data from systems to transform raw data into helpful information for business purposes.
Types of Business Intelligence Tools and Software
Business intelligence tools and software are available in a wide variety of forms. Let's have a quick look at some common business intelligence solution tools:
- Reporting Tools: Reporting software is used to report, organize, sort, and display data.
- Data Mining: Data mining tools are integrated to mine large data sets and identify patterns using artificial intelligence, machine learning, and statistics.
- Data Warehousing Tools: Data warehousing tools are used to integrate data retrieval from various sources to create a consolidated repository of data that can be then retrieved in the future for analysis.
- Dashboard Tools: Dashboards offer a real-time user interface to display data visualizations and reflect the current status of data.
Business Intelligence Tools - Benefits
Deducing action from data enables businesses to gain a competitive advantage, leading them to grow their customer base, enhance employee productivity, and create a better product. Business intelligence enables them to understand what's happening in real-time, ways to capitalize on it, and how to predict future outcomes. Businesses can find all of those answers in their data. Business intelligence (BI) further enables businesses and organizations to ask and answer questions about their data.
Today, Business Intelligence tools are more than just software; they offer a holistic and real-time view of all the relevant business data insights. Implementing business intelligence presents a myriad of benefits, from better data analysis to an increase in competitive advantage. Some of the top business intelligence benefits are as follows:
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Data clarity
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Improved efficiency
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Better customer experience
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Enhanced employee satisfaction
Business intelligence tools and software equip organizations with the ability to ask questions and generate answers they can understand. Instead of employing guesses, they can base their operational decisions on what the business data is telling them. Business intelligence helps organizations become data-driven enterprises, enhancing their performance and gaining a competitive advantage. They can:
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Enhance their ROI by understanding the business and allocating resources to meet strategic goals.
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Unravel customer behavior and preferences and use the generated insights to better target prospects or tailor solutions to changing market needs.
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Monitor business operations and make improvements on an ongoing basis.
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Improve supply chain management by scrutinizing activity up and down the line as well as communicating results with partners.
Read more: Business Intelligence vs Data Analytics: Understanding the Critical Differences
How Business Intelligence Tools Work?
Business Intelligence tools and platforms rely on data warehouses for their information. A data warehouse aggregates data from numerous sources into a central system to support business analytics as well as reporting. Business intelligence software queries the warehouse and delivers the results to the user in the form of reports and charts. Data warehouses also include an online analytical processing (OLAP) engine to support multidimensional queries. OLAP engines offer powerful technology for data discovery, facilitating business intelligence services along with complex analytic calculations and predictive analytics. One significant benefit of OLAP is the consistency of data and calculations used to drive data and improve product quality, customer interactions, and process improvements. Business intelligence solutions enable businesses to extract and ingest raw data directly using different technologies.
Choosing the Right Business Intelligence Tool
Any organization tasked with choosing the most significant business intelligence tool for their organization must review both market research and product features that match the applications with their business requirements. Use cases are a crucial consideration. A simple business intelligence tool with fewer features can be cost-effective and easier to use when training employees. A more sophisticated tool can be appropriate if end users are well-versed in the software. The key to successfully implementing business intelligence is choosing the right platform. When doing so, it is important to keep in mind the key features that are most helpful for business.
Some key features of business intelligence tools are:
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Intuitive to use
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Variety of dashboard and visualization tool options
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Smart Insights
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Alerts for good as well as bad metrics
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Built-in artificial intelligence (AI)
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Deployment flexibility
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Smooth integration with other platforms
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Data connectivity
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Embedding in business applications
Other considerations: Data Quality and Processes
One challenge many organizations face when analyzing their data is the quality as well as the level of integration of their data warehouse and underlying processes. The centralized repository of data must be consolidated, accessible, and accurate. The most crucial step to deploying business intelligence tools and analytics is not necessarily selecting the right tool but instead ensuring that the functional and operational data systems are trusted and dependable.
Factors to Consider When Choosing the Business Intelligence Tool
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Visual Functionality & Presentation
When creating data visualizations, is the tool easy to use, and does it support different user types? Business intelligence reporting tools are the face of the whole operation. It is what the users will refer to when making business decisions. Therefore, while visuals may not seem important when choosing a business intelligence tool if the dashboards are challenging to create or the poor-quality visuals are difficult to understand, then it will be more challenging to get people to actually use the tool in the first place.
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Customization
Every organization has unique operational needs. It is, therefore, essential to ensure that they select a business intelligence vendor that can accommodate the specific requirements. Today, many vendors provide minimal customization abilities, while some do not offer the ability to expand. Businesses should be very particular about the way they consume their data, making customization and extensibility critical factors when selecting your business intelligence vendor and tool.
Read more: The Ultimate Guide: List of Top 10 Best Data Visualization Tools
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Mobility
A mobile business intelligence tool is an easy and powerful tool to keep everyone connected. Mobility features are important to factor in for any company that has off-site workers or partners who need access to company data to stay informed. Determining the need for mobile business intelligence applications will enable users to view dashboards and reports as well as create or edit them on the go.
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Training Requirements
Any good business intelligence tool will require product training. This is a part of the essential investment businesses need to make to reap the full benefits of any business intelligence solution. Business intelligence tools have the ability to radically change the organization for the better only if they are willing to make an upfront investment in time and energy. Deciding early on to train the employees on the business intelligence product can prevent them from missing out on some of the most significant benefits business intelligence has to offer. Another critical component to consider is the quality and flexibility of the training offered.
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Pricing
There are three significant components to consider with regard to cost: subscriptions, growth, and hidden fees. With business growing and expanding on a regular basis, business intelligence needs to grow. Hence, to scale the solutions with a flexible pricing model, businesses need to be aware of any additional fees in the pricing model. It is also important to find out what the business will be spending on its business intelligence solution to avoid any surprises in the future.
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IT Support
An easy way to make business and technical users happy is to opt for a self-service business intelligence tool. Self-service business intelligence tools offer business users an easy business intelligence experience, freeing up their IT department to focus on other critical tasks. It is important to ensure that the tool allows IT to control the deployment and prevent any end-user chaos.
Implementing Business Intelligence Tools in Your Organization: Best Practices
Organizations can benefit from business intelligence tools by fully assessing operations and processes, understanding their customers, and gauging the market. They need to incorporate the right tools to aggregate business information, analyze it, discover patterns, and find the right solutions. The best business intelligence software supports critical decision-making processes by:
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Connecting to a wide range of data systems and data sets such as databases.
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Offering deep analysis enables users to discover hidden relationships and patterns.
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Presenting answers in informative data visualization formats such as reports, charts, and graphs.
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Enabling side-by-side comparisons of data under different systems.
Advanced business intellihence and analytics systems enable businesses to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) as well as machine learning (ML) to automate and streamline tasks. These capabilities further help accelerate the ability to analyze data and gain insights at a deep level.
Read more: Predictive Analytics Tools and Software for 2023: An Ultimate Guide
Importance of Business Intelligence Tools in Modern Business
Having a great business intelligence system is essential for every business today. Active vigilance of the company’s internal processes, along with its external health, is vital in this fast-paced world.
Today, as companies strive to be more data-driven, their efforts to share data and collaborate are likely to increase. Business intelligence offers just the right capabilities for near real-time sales tracking, enabling users to discover insights into customer behavior, forecast profits, and much more. With diverse industries such as retail, insurance, and oil adopting business intelligence, the platforms are providing new technology and innovation to their users.
With the business intelligence landscape continually evolving, organizations need to keep pace with the growing needs and technology. Leveraging critical data insights to improve organizational operations should be integral to the business’s core values. The business intelligence tool radically helps in improving the company’s operations, but only if it is the right tool for the organization. Choosing the right business intelligence tool includes not only the product but also the training, guidance, support, and expertise the vendor provides. Businesses can easily reap all of the benefits business intelligence has to offer by selecting the right business intelligence reporting tool for their organization’s needs today as well as in the future.
SG Analytics, recognized by the Financial Times as one of APAC's fastest-growing firms, is a prominent insights and analytics company specializing in data-centric research and contextual analytics. Operating globally across the US, UK, Poland, Switzerland, and India, we expertly guide data from inception to transform it into invaluable insights using our knowledge-driven ecosystem, results-focused solutions, and advanced technology platform. Our distinguished clientele, including Fortune 500 giants, attests to our mastery of harnessing data with purpose, merging content and context to overcome business challenges. With our Brand Promise of "Life's Possible," we consistently deliver enduring value, ensuring the utmost client delight.
A leading enterprise in Data Analytics, SG Analytics focuses on leveraging data management solutions, analytics, and data science to help businesses across industries discover new insights and craft tailored growth strategies. Contact us today to make critical data-driven decisions, prompting accelerated business expansion and breakthrough performance.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
A. What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence integrates business analytics, data mining, and data visualization tools and infrastructure to assist businesses in making more data-driven decisions.
B. Why is Business Intelligence Important?
Business Intelligence aims to help improve business decision-making by making data more accessible to interpret and act on. While BI involves collecting and visualizing data, it also includes software tools to undertake these practices.
C. What Are Some Common Challenges in Implementing Business Intelligence Tools?
Some of the significant 7 BI implementation challenges to consider are as follows:
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Ineffective Data Architecture
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Poor Data Quality
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Unclear BI Strategy
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Weak Content Management
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Low Adoption Rates
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High Fees
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Hard to Deliver Mobile BI
D. How Can Businesses Stay Updated with the Latest Business Intelligence Trends?
Cloud-based business intelligence solutions present numerous advantages. Real-time data access enables marketers to stay abreast with evolving market trends, customer behaviors, and campaign performance. It further facilitates rapid response to market changes, offering businesses a competitive edge.
About SG Analytics
SG Analytics (SGA) is a global data solutions firm that harnesses data with purpose across the data value chain - from origination, aggregation, management, modernization and analytics to insights generation to create powerful business outcomes for its customers.
Through its research and data analytics consulting services, SGA marries content with context to provide bespoke solutions to its customers enabling them to improve efficiency, scale and grow.
The company has a presence in New York, London, Zurich, Seattle, Austin, San Francisco, Toronto, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Wroclaw.
The firm serves customers across the banking financial services and insurance (BFSI), technology, media and entertainment (M&E), and healthcare sectors amongst others, including Fortune 500 companies.
Apart from being recognized by reputed firms such as Analytics India Magazine, Everest Group, and ISG, SG Analytics has been recently awarded as the top ESG consultancy of the year 2022 and Idea Awards 2023 by Entrepreneur India in the “Best Use of Data” category.
