In today’s digital and customer-centric world, businesses are facing stiff competition. Most of these businesses are bombarded with information and are actively exploring ways to derive significant insights and control from the data gathered. For businesses to resolve the issue of data overloading, obtain a competitive edge in the market, and make informed decisions, there is a need to adopt business intelligence. Unfortunately, even with the long list of benefits and the increasing number of users, most companies are very slow in adopting it. Business intelligence empowers you to combine the power of technology and business expertise to make informed decisions and outplay competitors. According to Techjury, more than 46% of businesses are already using a business intelligence tool as a core part of their business strategy.
Swain Scheps rightly highlights the importance of business intelligence in his quote:
“Business intelligence is essentially timely, accurate, high-value, and actionable business insights, and the work processes and technologies used to obtain them.”
Business Intelligence VS Business Analytics
Business intelligence and business analytics are often considered synonyms with the same meaning, definition, and method of working, but that's not the case.
Business intelligence refers to technologies and strategies developed by enterprise industries to analyze existing business data and provide historical, current, and predictive events for business operations. Present-day businesses are widely accepting business intelligence technologies.
Business analytics is the process of technologies and strategies utilized to continue analyzing and extracting insights and performance from historical business data to drive successful future business planning. There is also a long list of the importance of business analytics.
Common Challenges Faced by Today’s C-Suite
The responsibility of the C-Suite and the CEO, in particular, is to accelerate the growth of a company and work towards achieving industrial excellence. They face immense pressure from various stakeholders who sometimes have theoretical expectations regarding the performance of the company and its results. Let’s check out some of the common challenges faced by the C-Suite.
Expectations for Growth Acceleration
Driving growth and achieving a significant increase in the profit margin annually are among the top challenges faced by today’s C-suite. In the event of continued failure in achieving this goal, CEOs can affect their record.
Business intelligence solutions analyze all the company data and assist the C-suite in making informed decisions. They also help in accelerating the growth of the organization by optimizing internal business processes, enhancing operational efficiency, gaining a competitive edge, and others. By extracting important information from unstructured data and turning it into useful information, BI helps to speed up the process.
Stakeholder’s Demands
Stakeholders can sometimes demand theoretical or special reports and data. Failure to fulfill this demand can upset the stakeholders.
While business intelligence tools may not help you meet the special demands of your stakeholders, but it will certainly help you analyse and explain why a particular target could not be achieved. Moreover, it also keeps track of all the activities, your decisions, and how the company has performed, which will reflect your efforts and incremental progress to the stakeholders.
Budgetary Restrictions
According to Betsy Burton, vice president and distinguished analyst with Gartner, the cost of BI tools is high, which limits their implementation in businesses with limited budget access, such as small to mid-sized companies. Despite the demand and
need for business intelligence, often a minimum portion of the operating budget is allocated for the improvement and upgradation of data analytics and the business intelligence systems. As a result, progress is not made, benefits of business intelligence are not reaped, and the cycle of challenges continues in the C-suite.
In this case, businesses can either explore adopting business intelligence tools in phases, or they can opt for self-service BI or embedded BI tools, which are more affordable and can be easily integrated with existing systems.
How Can Business Intelligence Make a Difference?
Not only enterprise companies, but even small, mid-sized, and large businesses can benefit from business intelligence. Adopting business intelligence technologies has numerous benefits. Here are the top seven reasons why having business intelligence (BI) is crucial.
Gain Customer Insights
With the help of business intelligence, businesses can analyze their customers’ buying patterns to obtain customer insights and create user profiles as per their behavior. Customer insights will help businesses create better products and enhance the product experience for their customers.
Improved Efficiency Across the Organization
Having an effective business intelligence system significantly improves the efficiency of the overall business processes and has a positive impact on revenue. In addition, access to meaningful insights reduces the waiting time for reports and increases team productivity.
Gain Sales and Market Intelligence
If you are a sales executive or a marketer, you probably keep track of your customers with the help of a
CRM solution. A CRM solution aims to collect all the data and make sense of the data about your customers through charts and tables.
Insights into Consumer Behavior
One of the significant benefits of investing in business intelligence is that it increases the ability to analyze and understand customer behavior. It will highlight a customer’s buying behavior and highlight changes in behavioral patterns.
Improved Business Operations Visibility
Understanding the importance of business intelligence helps control business processes. It helps to assess what is going on in a business carefully. Active vigilance over processes and standard procedures can help to fix errors.
Return on Investment (ROI)
Business intelligence helps a company get a better return on its investment (ROI) by improving strategic awareness, speeding up reporting, cutting operating costs, and getting better quality data.
Gives a Competitive Edge
Apart from all the other benefits of business intelligence, having the potential to handle and analyze enormous amounts of data is in itself a competitive advantage. Furthermore, budgeting, planning, and forecasting are effective ways to keep up with the competition, go well beyond ordinary analysis, and are simple to implement with
business intelligence tools.
Final Thoughts
Understanding the importance of business intelligence and having a great business intelligence system has become quite essential for businesses these days. Business intelligence is much more than just graphical representation. It is a set of tools that businesses can use to help their employees succeed. BI can change your business by providing the information required to make fast and informed decisions.
FAQ
Will my business data be secure?
Any IT system must have data security and availability as their top priority. A business intelligence solution should provide the high standards of performance, reliability, and security. To keep the data safe, credible business intelligence solutions make use of existing security infrastructures.
My business has already invested in CRM, Accounting, and Marketing Software. So, why should I also invest in Business Intelligence?
While you may utilize a variety of line-of-business systems to administer your company, BI is about integrating data from numerous sources in an organized way to graphically represent information in a meaningful way. A constructive business intelligence solution should be able to connect to daily business software with ease.
Why Is BI Reporting Better Than Conventional MIS Reports?
Management reporting is only a small part of business intelligence. It gives you real-time, quick, and easy access to actionable business information about customers, goods, finance, and the market.