The phrase “business intelligence” (or simply BI) seems to have come onto the scene not too long ago, ushering in a whole new way companies do business. In reality, BI has been around for quite a while—decades even—as its foundation is rooted in helping organizations stand up to the significant challenges that come from doing business in the modern world.
What Exactly is Business Intelligence?
Let’s take a step back for a moment and discuss what BI actually is. In short, BI utilizes analytics, data mining, data visualization, and data tools to help companies make better decisions that are backed by actual data and factual guidance.
Business intelligence employs software that ingests companies’ data, processes this information, and churns out user-friendly versions of this material in views such as reports, dashboards, charts, and graphs. With this output, users can analyze the information to gain insights into how their firms are performing.
Why Your Organization Needs Business Intelligence This Year
Okay, so now that you know a little more about what BI is, let’s dive into why you need it.
1. Automation of Manual Tasks
This isn’t a stand-alone point. In fact, when you automate manual tasks, you’ll realize many benefits from your efforts, including:
- More time available from your staff members to work on more productive endeavors
- Fewer human errors and data-entry issues
- Greater simplicity of your processes overall
- Reduced costs associated with errors and the time it would otherwise take to complete tasks manually
- Opportunities to refine all business processes within your organization
Sounds great, right?
In reality, you probably have more data available to you than you know what to do with. This is where business intelligence comes into the picture. Through its agile analytics and profound analytical abilities, BI can help you sort through your data using a rapid and precise data insight process. Once this information is put to use for whatever goals and operational targets you’ve chosen to pursue, BI tools can also analyze and measure its impacts, guiding the success or failure of your internal strategies.
This feedback can create a cycle of intelligent decision-making, goal setting, and strategizing that often has a minimal outlook of failure when done correctly.
2. Meeting Compliance Requirements
When’s the last time you thought about data centralization and your company’s ability to meet compliance within your industry?
The truth is, business data requirements as they relate to companies’ abilities to meet and maintain compliance are often overlooked—yet very important—factors. This is a trial most companies face, since data often lives in multiple repositories, creating problems in integrating it for review on a single platform. BI-led data processing often remove this barrier, enabling all data to be analyzed uniformly and readily available for single-point analytics. Business intelligence can also handle compliance needs because data privacy activity merges into a single-step process with the integration of proper BI elements.
3. Cloud Platforms are Surging in Popularity
The use of data and analytics in today’s business world is generally considered essential. Similarly, it’s also true that the technologies needed to achieve substantial levels of analytics capabilities within their organizations are considerably less expensive and simpler to implement than they were not too long ago. This is largely the result of a rise in cloud data centers that offer software-as-a-service (SaaS) products to businesses.
Today, SaaS technology is one of the most predominant tools for businesses to embrace, and it’s particularly popular among small and medium firms because it doesn’t necessitate servers to be placed on the premises and can be scaled with far more flexibility than traditional on-site solutions.
4. Analytics Drive Business’s Success
Although the adoption of BI has grown over the past few years, analytics acceptance among many SMBs still remains quite low. According to Gartner, 87% of organizations had low BI and analytics maturity just a few years ago. In 2020, NewVantage Partners found that only 27% of organizations surveyed considered their work environments to be data-driven.
As companies continue to grow their understandings of the need to implement BI answers to their operational obstacles, business intelligence technology will continue to be a priority feature of digital transformation in 2022.
Bottom Line: The Future of Business Intelligence in 2022
No matter your industry or the size of your company, it’s critical to establish a data-driven strategy for success this year, and BI can help you make that happen. Making use of cloud BI tech is becoming essential, as it offers data that’s high-quality, accessible, and actionable. As companies continue to embrace data-driven approaches to their operations, the need for BI tools will only increase. If you’re not on board with BI yet, it’s time to msake the change now!
At MIBAR, we understand the value of powerful BI software, and know the role it provides in improving your decision making while growing your business. Whether you need BI functionality embedded into your ERP software or are looking for a standalone product that integrates to show you the whole picture—we have helped companies just like yours to discover, implement, and operate essential business software like Power BI for nearly three decades. Get to know more about our work, read customer testimonials, and contact us for a free consultation.
Additional Business Intelligence Resources
Business Intelligence Made Easy—Power BI Case Study (On-Demand Webinar)
Power BI: Modern Business Analytics for the New Economy (On-Demand Webinar)
The Right Information in the Right Hands: How Real Users Leverage Power BI
