Through this article, we will together discover the answers to questions like “What is BI?”, “Who uses BI?”, “Why?”. We will also discuss the various advantages and challenges of business intelligence inside organizations.
What exactly is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence or “BI” delivers relevant and reliable DATA to the right people at the right time in an easy-to-consume format, with the goal of making better decisions, faster.
It is a term that refers to the practices and disciplines of collection of data coming from multiple sources under different forms, storage, and analysis, then a presentation of that data under the form of information that will decision-making process.
The Data Warehouse Toolkit, 3rd Edition — Kimball Group
The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to the technologies, applications, and practices for collecting, integrating, analyzing, and presenting the information.
The latter aims to help make better decisions. Business Intelligence systems are essentially data-based decision support (DSS) systems.
These practices are made possible, facilitated, and accelerated by hardware infrastructures and a combination of several tools such as Talend, Power BI, Tableau, Hadoop, according to the needs of the project.
Practicing BI within the company or with a Partner allows organizations to change from a decision-making model based on intuition and a bit of guesswork or possibly a decision-making model based on persuasion or the hierarchical factor towards one of decision-making supported by facts, figures, data.
It keeps the company’s Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) accessible to decision-makers in an easily understandable and actionable (i.e. can be executed) way.
This can be in the form of Reports, Graphs, Presentations, and especially Dashboards in real-time!
Why Business Intelligence?
BI can help businesses make better decisions by providing historical data, presenting the current state of affairs, and forecasting future results based on available information.
It gives a clear overview of what is happening in the company or what is called an Eagle Vision instead of an ant vision that traditional tools give, a BI solution must also allow notifications and alerts when needed.
Here are some ways to use Business Intelligence to improve your business:
- Prediction of successful actions
- Market share monitoring
- Better campaign targeting
- Identification of problems and challenges
- Understanding of customers, employees, partners, suppliers, distributors, and competitors, fundamentally, to understand all parties involved in the business.
- Discovery of Growth Markets / Products / Services opportunities.
- Customer segmentation.
- Anticipation of risks and act against them.
- Having only one source of truth in the business.
In general, BI lets you know in which direction to which destination the business is headed. Who would want to drive a car blindfolded just on the basis of instincts and intuition? So why run a business this way?
Examples of BI use
Sales
Revenue from products, services, and programs. Horizontal and vertical comparison of turnover, commissions for the sales manager, support for sales strategies …
Marketing
Campaign management, Subscription management, Discounts, Improving customer satisfaction by understanding their preferences …
Human Resources
Cost of employees, legal and regulatory compliance, job application at the selection/rejection rate, expected growth in the number of employees, Turnover …
Finances
Budgeting, accruals, reports and cost center planning, profit and loss reports, invoicing reports …
Product/service management teams
Monitoring of product/service performance, comparison of products/services/categories…
Operations
Ticket book, call center statistics, technical performance indicators …
Education
Oversee the learning and development of students, assess their educational needs, and identify weaknesses in curricula.
Nonprofit
Overview of the journey of members of the organization, make sure they are getting the right development needed and that there is a pipeline down the organization’s hierarchy.
Who uses BI?
There are different types of BI users in an organization, each one uses the system differently. Usually with the help of a partner who will help the company govern and secure the system and train employees.
CEO or CXO
Uses Business Intelligence to gain an overview of all areas of the business in order to optimize them and improve efficiency.
The user “IT”
Manage and maintain a robust infrastructure and data flows from the company’s operational systems (Stock, Commercial, Financial, CRM, ERP, etc.) to the data management system (BI)
Statistician and the Analyst
Uses the BI system to slice up data and dive deep into it to find the roots of problems or have actionable insights into a specific problem.
“Business” user
Any manager, stakeholder, or decision-maker in the company who will need the data on which to base their important decisions, can be a manager, a team leader, or even an employee. A BI system gives different views and access to different people in the organization to ensure data security and privacy.
Self Service BI
Today, companies are increasingly converting to what is called Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI); Systems that, once built using best practices with the help of a BI partner, will enable any actor in the business — without having a solid background in statistics or data analysis or IT — to be able to explore the data in depth.
SSBI is commonly used in the form of platforms containing Dashboards and generating interactive reports that are adaptive to user needs.
Often, SSBI systems are intuitive and easy to use. However, while the complexity of the company’s business processes sometimes makes it necessary to train employees, the return on this investment remains enormous.
Clearly, highlighting the benefits of BI makes people more likely to get involved.
Classic Business Intelligence Challenges
Today, companies still find it difficult to implement BI into their workflows. These difficulties include, in particular:
Costs
Implementing a BI System can be quite expensive depending on the complexity of the business infrastructure, which also makes BI hard to afford for small businesses.
Complexity
The need for highly skilled BI technicians to implement sophisticated BI systems, and the extremely long process (between 180 days and two years!) For the system to start showing value.
Poor Data Infrastructure
Some companies that don’t use data to make decisions in the first place can have a rather difficult and messy infrastructure, which makes the BI process difficult and sometimes requires a data management project upfront.
Agile Business Intelligence
The term “Agile” generally refers to a software development methodology that was invented in 2011 respecting the following principles:
- Human, that is to say, individuals and interactions rather than processes and tools;
- Application, that is, operational features rather than exhaustive documentation;
- Collaboration with the client rather than the contextualization of relations;
- Accepting change rather than following a plan.
In practice, Agile is an iterative approach that delivers the product in different increments by prioritizing the most important use cases first.
Many BI companies, such as DASH, have successfully adopted this methodology to tackle and overcome BI challenges or find a way around them. Using this methodology, we can, among other things:
- Provide customers with operational versions in record time
- Offer flexible and adaptable solutions in the context of constant economic change thanks to the iterative processes developed
- Reduce the costs of implementing a BI project by fragmenting it with many iterations. The adoption of BI is no longer a cumbersome and expensive project and becomes accessible to small accounts.
By embracing Agile BI we find change, not as an obstacle or a problem, but rather as a powerful competitive advantage for our customers, especially in such a volatile and unpredictable market, flexible and adaptive BI has become a necessity, and the companies that adopt it are reaping the rewards.
Do you want to implement business intelligence in your organization? Reach out to us to help you understand how you can get more value from your data and scale your business to the next level.