Why Business Intelligence is Important
We are living in the age of technological progression. Digital advancements have completely revolutionized our everyday lives, and one of the largest impacts felt has been in the business world. Companies now have access to data-driven tools and strategies that allow them to learn more about their customers and themselves than ever before, but not everyone is taking advantage of them. Today we’re going to breakdown Business Intelligence and why it’s crucial to the success and longevity of your organization.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Before we jump into the importance, we must first understand Business Intelligence and how it applies to your company’s strategic initiatives. The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the technologies, applications, strategies, and practices used to collect, analyze, integrate, and present pertinent business information. The entire purpose of Business Intelligence is to support and facilitate better business decisions. BI allows organizations access to information that is critical to the success of multiple areas including sales, finance, marketing, and a multitude of other areas and departments. Effectively leveraging BI will empower your business with increased actionable data, provide great insights into industry trends, and facilitate a more strategically geared decision-making model.
To illustrate BI in action, here are a few departmental specific examples of insights and benefits that can come from its adoption and application:
- Human Resources: HR can tremendously benefit from the implementation of Business Intelligence utilizing employee productivity analysis, compensation and payroll tracking, and insights into employee satisfaction.
- Finance: Business Intelligence can help finance departments by providing invaluable and in-depth insights into financial data. The application of BI can also help to track quarterly and annual budgets, identify potential problem areas before they cause any negative impacts, and improve the overall organizational business health and financial stability.
- Sales: Business Intelligence can assist your company’s sales force by providing visualizations of the sales cycle, in-depth conversion rates analytics, as well as total revenue analysis. BI can help your sales team to identify what’s working as well as points of failure which can result in dramatically improved sales performance.
- Marketing: BI provides the marketing department with a convenient way to view all current and past campaigns, the performance and trends of those campaigns, a breakdown of the cost per lead and the return on investment, site traffic analytics, as well as a multitude of other actionable pieces of information.
- Executive Leadership: Plain and simple, Business Intelligence allows organizations to reduce costs by improving efficiency and productivity, improving sales, and revealing opportunities for continuous improvement. Business Intelligence allows members of Executive Leadership to more easily measure the organization’s pulse by removing gray areas and eliminating the need to play the guessing game on how the company is doing.
Why Is Business Intelligence Important?
Now you know what Business Intelligence is, what it’s capable of, but the question remains; why is Business Intelligence so important to modern-day organizations? The main reasons to invest in a solid BI strategy and system are:
- Gain New Customer Insights: One of the primary reasons companies are investing their time, money, and efforts into Business Intelligence is because it gives them a greater ability to observe and analyze current customer buying trends. Once you utilize BI to understand what your consumers are buying and the buying motive, you can use this information to create products and product improvements to meet their expectations and needs and, as a result, improve your organization’s bottom-line.
- Improved Visibility: Business Intelligent organizations have better control over their processes and standard operating procedures, as the visibility of these functions is improved by a BI system. The days of skimming through hundreds of pages of annual reports to assess performance are long gone. Business Intelligence illuminates all areas of your organization helps you to readily identify areas for improvement and allow you to be prepared instead of reactive.
- Actionable Information: An effective Business Intelligence system serves as a means to identify key organizational patterns and trends. A BI system also allows you to understand the implications of various organizational processes and changes, allowing you to make informed decisions and act accordingly.
- Efficiency Improvements: BI Systems help improve organizational efficiency which consequently increases productivity and can potentially increase revenue. Business Intelligence systems allow businesses to share vital information across departments with ease, saving time on reporting, data extraction, and data interpretation. Making the sharing of information easier and more efficient permits organizations to eliminate redundant roles and duties, allowing the employees to focus on their work instead of focusing on processing data.
- Sales Insight: Sales and marketing teams alike want to keep track of their customers, and most utilize Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application to do so. CRMs are designed to handle all interactions with customers. Because they house all customer communications and interactions, there is a wealth of data and information that can be interpreted and used to strategic initiatives. BI systems help organizations with everything from identifying new customers, tracking and retaining existing ones, and providing post-sale services.
- Real-Time Data: When executives and decision-makers have to wait for reports to be compiled by various departments, the data is prone to human error and is at risk of being outdated before it’s even submitted for review. BI systems provide users with access to data in real-time through various means including spreadsheets, visual dashboards, and scheduled emails. Large amounts can be assimilated, interpreted, and distributed quickly and accurately when leveraging Business Intelligence tools.
- Competitive Advantage: In addition to all of these great benefits, Business Intelligence can help you gain insight into what your competitors are doing, allowing your organization to make educated decisions and plan for future endeavors.
In summary, BI makes it possible to combine data from multiple sources, analyze the information into a digested format, and then disseminate the information to relevant stakeholders. This allows companies to see the big picture and make smart business decisions. There are always inherent risks when it comes to making any business decision, but those risks aren’t as prominent or worrisome when implementing an effective and reliable BI solution. Business Intelligent organizations can move forward in an increasingly data-driven climate with confidence knowing they are prepared for any challenge that arises.
The Analytiks team is here to improve your organization’s efficiency by leveraging your existing data. We will provide you with the tools your business needs to transform complex, unorganized, and confusing data into clear and actionable insights. This helps to speed your decision-making processes and ensures that all your business decisions are educated and backed with reliable data, and lots of it! Get in touch with the Analytiks team today to see how we can improve your business!
