Don’t underestimate your business users! They have market, domain and professional expertise that add value to the organization and, with the right BI tools and features, business users can gather, analyze and make decisions using data from all across the enterprise. You don’t have to leave the business intelligence and analytics efforts to IT or business analysts or data scientists.
Business Intelligence drives business success. Being able to gain insight out of all the data in your enterprise is crucial to business success today. Your competition is always thinking of new ways to succeed and so should you! If you can provide your business users with BI tools and a simple, easy-to-use BI Dashboard, you can use these BI tools and solutions to achieve results and move your business forward.
So you are dreaming of a business intelligence solution that will bring together all the data in your enterprise and make it easily accessible for analysis and now it’s time to look at BI tools and solutions. For starters, you’ll want self-serve business intelligence. You don’t want to have to deal with restrictive dashboards and environments designed by your IT team. Your IT team certainly means well, but they can’t possibly imagine all the ways you’ll want to use the system, so you want something that is flexible enough for YOU to use the way YOU need to use it today – a solution that will accommodate what you will need tomorrow too!
Business Intelligence and Analytics is as necessary for small businesses and start-ups as it is for a large enterprise. There is no room for a misstep or a market error in today’s competitive environment. Whether your business is local or global, all online or brick and mortar, government, public sector or consumer focused or playing in a very specialized market, you and your team need business intelligence and analytics tools.
Business intelligence and analytics is not just for data scientists or IT professionals anymore. If your business is going to be successful, it must compete and it must solve problems, find opportunities and plan with accuracy. There is no time for a misstep in the market!
What is business intelligence? It is quite simple, really. Business intelligence is ‘intelligence’ about ‘business’. Having said that, we cannot really presume that ‘intelligence’ is simply data. Data on its own tells us little and can, at times, actually confuse the very issue you are trying to understand. In order to get to the heart of the business intelligence definition it is useful to consider that the word ‘intelligence’ as defined in the dictionary as ‘the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills’.
Your business is excited about the prospect of implementing a self-serve business intelligence solution! You have heard your colleagues talk about the benefits of data democratization, and you know your business users will take full advantage of BI reporting, social BI, and mobile BI, and that they understand the importance of business intelligence and analytics. You want all the advantages offered by a great business intelligence solution, the BI dashboard, KPI software, and all those useful Business Intelligence Tools
When your business begins the process of choosing or changing business intelligence tools and business intelligence services, it is easy to get confused! There are many choices in the market and not all of them are created equal. A business intelligence company offering solutions, features and functionality for advanced analytics must be suitable for your requirements or your initiative will not succeed.
When you are looking for a BI solution, do not ignore the trend toward data democratization and data literacy among your team members. To create the greatest assets to your company and improve team member value, you want to provide access to critical data and a simple way to perform advanced analytics so that users will adopt BI tools and you can create a social BI environment with improved data popularity and power users who will share knowledge and encourage the use of data and fact-driven decision-making.
I recently attended a business intelligence conference and I spoke with a small business owner who attended the conference in hopes of finding out how to leverage business intelligence to sustain growth and address competition while juggling other responsibilities and managing a small business budget.
