Why is Business Intelligence an Integral Cog in Business Success today?

In today's data driven world, business leaders may feel overwhelmed given the sudden influx of data. By merging, business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools and infrastructure, and others, business intelligence (BI) helps these leaders in making more data-driven decisions. At present, BI enables organizations to identify ways to increase profit, analyze customer behavior, compare data with competitors, track performance, optimize operations, spot market trends and many other crucial activities in the business pipeline.

Business intelligence addresses numerous problems that perpetuate in organizations. For instance, it enables the examination of data to understand trends and derive insights by streamlining the effort required to search for, merge and query the data necessary to make sound business decisions. Given the current situation of huge data generation, it helps make sense of data in comparatively lesser time and solves the problem of limited data accessibility. Meanwhile, since gathering relevant data and analyzing it can be a tedious process, business intelligence allows report will be delivered quickly, thus helping to know clients, market trends, problem points, etc., better.

Many existing business intelligence tools offer pay-per-use options, subscription options, and other pay-as-you-go opportunities – which enables businesses to operate at a scale when needed. Further, it proves resourceful when organizations need to track how their Key Performance Indicators [KPIs] are being fulfilled. Additionally, one can leverage data visualization tools to represent insights via understandable graphics and visuals.

Considering the multitude of benefits offered by business intelligence, it is high time, C-suite leaders pay attention to some of the best practices that can help unlock better ROI.

The key to achieving success in business intelligence begins with taking stock of which employees understand and use its tools in their jobs. This is crucial because, unless an organization can look at the dashboard, and understand the data presented the gains will be small.

Next, before moving ahead to quality BI implementation, it is important to outline the project scope and assess requirements to formulate a cohesive strategy. For this, a thorough survey of how top leaders and managers and departments are using existing data is necessary. Then one must study how business intelligence could help them better understand the status of their departments and projects and enhance how activities are carried out. After this, identify data sources and integration methods, team up with all stakeholders to reach an agreement on expectations, achieve uniformity in desired metrics, and pinpoint the KPIs that matter most for performance tracking. Only, after completion of the previous step, companies can proceed to design a strategic BI blueprint that highlights everyone's key roles and responsibilities.

Since the intricacies of a business intelligence implementation can be mind-boggling, there are few things to keep in mind. One foolproof way to maximize the chances of BI project success is to use agile methods where possible. Second, ensure the solution provided to the team is intuitive and easy to use. In the integration phase, either, prefer the manual approach, by relying on company developers and IT team to develop a BI architecture for custom requirements. Or, buy an enterprise-ready integration solution from the market.

It is also vital to remember that one must first execute tasks that are influential and less time-consuming to implement, then build out complexity in iterations. Also, make sure to choose the right visualization for each metric. In addition to these, before implementing business intelligence, one must set up security measures to protect information assets against data breaches. By configuring authorization or authentication protocols and outlining procedures to carry out secure data processes, organizations can control access to data sets.