Why and when should you invest in a business intelligence software?
I think we can agree that in the last ten years the generation and usage of data has radically changed our society, specially the way in which we do business. Today, the most valued companies are technology companies that use data as their main asset to innovate and increase their revenue. However, this business revolution does not only affect tech companies, every organization can and must take advantage of this new way of thinking their monetization strategy.
The effort needed to convert data into value insights radically differs between each company. Data is almost always available, but the rights skills that we need to get the insights are not well distributed. Tech companies have historically spent big budgets on storing and analyzing information. But this new generation of business requires that every company, that aims to be relevant, change the way of making decisions. Data driven decisions are the new standard. We are not implying intuition is not relevant any more or that people will be replaced by intelligent bots. Just the opposite. We mean that in order to be successful, a company needs to combine the best of each world: the uniqueness of humans with the precision and quickness of modern data processing.
We want humans and machines to work together and improve our organizations and our society. The way to do that is to empower more people, not technical experts, so that they can explore data, simulate scenarios, make predictions and be able to change the way in which they take decisions.
Working with data has many sexy aspects, such as using modern processing techniques and complex mathematical models. You will probably have heard about Python, R, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and many other concepts. We need to be clear on this point: the evolution of the analytics and AI in the last ten year is really thrilling and even frightening. However, we want to focus in an aspect of this revolution: how will analytics and AI change the way which we do business?
We need to make analytics available for many people as fast as possible to maximize the impact. In order to do that, BI softwares have a key role to play: they are tools that simplify the technicalities and keep the analytic power handy for the business experts.
I think that there are two questions that are necessary to answer in this discussion. The first one is why to invest in BI and the second one is when to do it. Let’s try to do it!
We find a simple answer to the question “why should you embrace business intelligence?” To be more efficient and to save money. However, there is another answer that I rather prefer, and it is more radical: Companies should focus on BI to be able to survive in the new market. It is critical to find your insights and turn then into value to deal with competitors. As I mentioned before, this is a must for all organizations, not only for the tech ones. The following questions could be how to change the way in which we make decisions into a data-driven one. Business Intelligence software is the answer to that question.
BI softwares combine and simplify many steps that were traditionally very expensive to do. These tasks such as: collect, transform, normalize data and get it into a warehouse used to be necessary before we could even create a dashboard or calculate a KPI. They are still necessary to be honest. But one thing has changed: the BI softwares are able to do all these tasks in just a few hours. Its embedded functionalities allow non-technical users, business experts, to connect data coming from hundreds of different sources without the need of coding or learning complex processes. This means that they can focus on chasing the insights rather than on the technical aspects. We can also create KPI and dashboard in an easy and intuitive way. We don’t need help from a frontend expert to build high quality user interfaces. BI softwares allow us to find insights by exploring data in a fast and efficient way. Our storytelling can be easily built over rock solid data, making our arguments more appealing and convincing. We should keep in mind the importance of sharing our findings with other peoples in the right way, making complexity understandable to key decision makers. A BI software brings analytic power to small and medium organizations rising them to the level of companies with large teams fully dedicated to the task.
The second questions that we would like to address is when we should begin our analytics path. The answer is: as soon as we can. BI softwares will make you save the money, as we explain before, due to its simplicity to work. But we didn’t discuss yet that of having and integrated view of our data, and our customers data, will lead us into a new world of business insights. These insights can be the basics of new business strategies for many areas, such as finance, marketing, logistics and any other. We will also be able to compare your KPIs against our competitors. The best way to be more efficient is to know exactly where we are under the standards and work on fixing it. Track and measure are key actions that will lead us to savings. That is why time is so critical, the soon as we can begin working on analytics, the soon we are going to see our first results.
To sum up, we need to be more efficient but we also need to deliver more value for our clients. BI is one of the must have to stay relevant. We need analytics and AI to survive in this modern world, and the most efficient way to do it is investing in a proper BI software for our company.
