Why is Business Intelligence Important for Your Company?

Ashrith ND

What is Business Intelligence?

BI is a generalized term covering different methods of collecting and analysing data for a business. BI is all about harnessing data that a business generates in different forms, visualise it and provide insights into how a business is performing. These insights, allow the business to make smarter business decisions to help the business evolve and grow. Data-Analysis-Insight, are basically the three stages of BI.

We are living in a world where businesses generate a lot of data. Be it a small departmental store, an online shopping website, or a cloud-based service businesses- they all generate tons of data. The business data of any organisation, small or big is to serve the business primarily, however, BI uses this data to their advantage by presenting the otherwise unusable heap of data into an interpretable and understandable form. BI reports, with the help of business expertise can be used to make informed decision and stay ahead of the competition.

Let me take you deeper into understanding the analysis and insights BI offers

Just like how a dashboard for a car displays information like speed, fuel level, distance, RPM, etc, each analysis usually takes the form of a report containing visual representations of business’s metrics, or KPIs (Key Performance Indicator, a quantifiable measure of performance over time for a specific objective). By tracking these KPIs you can measure the business’s performance. Visualising the data makes it easy to read, understand and digest. A dashboard gives you an at-a-glance snapshot of performance and helps you understand areas where one is doing well and where there is a need for attention.

Finally, once we have got all the data together, analysed and visualised, it’s time for the insight stage. Here, we read the results of the analysis and see what we can learn from the trends, see how metrics correlate with each other, also compare periods of time to see how things are evolving.

Having the basic understanding of Business Intelligence, let’s look into, Why is BI crucial?

Data visualisation is an integral part of BI, using BI tools we can create interactive visualisations like maps, graphs; making it much easier for human mind to digest and thus enabling it to spot patterns and trends. Here are some reasons I believe BI system is crucial for any business.

• Ability to spot competitive advantage

Businesses are moving at neck-breaking speeds and so is their competition. For a business to have an edge in the market, every decision they make must be an informed one. BI enables businesses to have insights into what their competitors are doing.

• Ability to view customer insights

Effective BI can help better understand the customers by analysing their buying patterns. Using customer insights, one can build user profiles. This in-turn helps businesses create better products and product experiences for their customers.

• Improve marketing and exposure

Effective BI can help better understand their customers by analysing their buying patterns. Using customer insights, one can build user profiles. This in-turn helps businesses create better products and product experiences for their customers.

• Improve operation visibility

BI systems enable a marketing team to create better marketing campaigns by using data from current and previous campaigns. Metrics such as reach, customer acquisition cost, ROI can be obtained using the historical data.

• Better efficiency organising the business

Having better control over a business process is very critical. Using BI, a business can have better visibility of what’s going on in the organisation. By making meaningful data accessible across various teams in an organisation, we can achieve better productivity and reduce waiting time. This in turn positively impacts the overall revenue of the organisation.

Conclusion

Having a good BI system is essential for every business. Having an active vigilance upon the company’s external health is crucial to keep up with the fast-paced businesses. In a world where data is the new oil, BI could leverage this oil to create world powers.