Every company that keeps an eye on spending rightly asks: “Why invest in Business Intelligence (BI) tools?” Many enterprise systems include some reporting capabilities, but they rarely provide enough insight. When a team has a process setup that records volumes of data that are not available to them, it can be frustrating. Once you start to see what a solution can do, the reasons to invest in Business Intelligence will quickly add up.
Charts and visuals
It is well accepted that images can convey certain information with an immediacy that text cannot match. A BI document can provide the quick assessment needed and deliver aggregated data for further analysis and even granular detail, when required. Charts can easily:
- Enable the identification of outliers
- Show when trends are forming
- Expose inconsistencies
and, in general, inform the business about metrics across the whole organisation.
The full story
Few companies run on a single IT system. If an integrated reporting package is available, it will only report on that single system. Frequently, management will want a more comprehensive view of the state of the company. All good BI solutions will be able to load data from a variety of sources. Using data from multiple systems makes it possible to build a picture of the business from different angles and present them together.
Having a BI tool that can enable analysis by users, when they need it, is a good way to empower employees to make the best decisions at the most opportune moment, not a few days later when the opportunity has been lost.
In detail
To be able to react to situations in a timely manner, it is important that information is delivered at the right moment. With BI tools, it is possible to configure alerts that trigger when a defined set of metrics is reached. This means the company can proactively take action to prevent a potential problem from occurring or to prepare for imminent milestones. In addition, some BI solutions provide monitoring of social media feeds to pick up negative or positive sentiment, allowing the company to respond quickly.
Sharing
Once some BI analysis is available, the benefit of this knowledge should be extended to a wider audience. The BI tool provides many mechanisms to broaden the audience, for example:
- As a web portal
- Distributed documents
- Alerts
- Self-service analysis
Beyond the business itself, customers often want access to their data, and BI providers can make this possible by exposing the analysis through the company’s portals and websites.
Control
If BI analysis is going to be shared, you must consider who sees what. For example, you may want your sales manager to see all the team’s transactions, but each individual salesperson to see only their own activity. Such column-level or row-level security can generally be configured by the document designer. In addition, it is important to have control: a place to schedule and automate tasks, and for IT administrators to control access and manage the most appropriate architecture for BI delivery.
Predictive analytics
For the most part, BI is a retrospective activity; however, some solutions will provide a forward-looking view. This can take the form of predictive analytics that uses historical data to build a model with which future predictions are made. Or you can set input parameters and variables to carry out “what-if” analysis: for example, if the price of fuel changes, how would profitability be affected.
At Digital Fox Data we implement Business Intelligence solutions in Qlik, Tableau and Power BI that cover all of this —charts, source integration, alerts, security and predictive analytics—. If you are wondering where to start, read where do you start a BI project? or let’s talk about your case.