A growing number of industries have started realizing the power and value in business intelligence tools. A study conducted by Dresner Advisory Services found that nearly a quarter of insurance and business services providers today have a BI penetration of 81% or higher. Furthermore, the highest rate of BI adoption was found among small businesses.
It should, however, be noted that a lot of this adoption comes from the promise that business intelligence solutions offer. A sustained investment in BI is only possible when businesses realize an exponentially increasing ROI from these solutions. Extracting greater value from BI is thus critical.
Cross-department use
In a number of organizations, business intelligence is mainly viewed as a sales and marketing tool. In many other businesses, BI is reserved exclusively to those in executive positions. Not making BI accessible to other departments like HR and operations could prevent these teams from making intelligent decisions that can impact the success and failure of other teams as well. Also, reserving the tool exclusively for executives might work for organizations that have a top-down structure. But with more and more businesses moving to a horizontal decision-making structure, it is important to democratize the information and make access to BI available for everyone.
If your organization does not have the bandwidth or resources to expand access to BI, it is a good idea to create a dedicated team for BI and allow them service requests from various departments across your organization.
Identify the right objectives
The term business intelligence’ can be quite generic and that is part of the reason why many executives get overwhelmed by its potential use-cases. BI can mean several things including data mining, text analytics, web analytics, real-time monitoring, and predictive analytics. Not all businesses and departments will need all of these various functionalities.
It is common for business users to look at the features on offer with their BI tools and figure a way to deploy them for their various departments. But to extract greater value, it is worth identifying your core business objectives and identifying the BI features that will make analysis and reporting of these objectives efficient. Some BI solutions like those that come with Oracle Fusion have dedicated software versions for various industries like insurance, banking, consumer goods, and so on. If your BI tool does not offer similar
BI Automation
BI applications can be configured to extract data from multiple sources and derive meaningful insights from this data. As such, this information is only as powerful as its timeliness. It is not rare for businesses to have dedicated personnel to translate data derived from BI apps into spreadsheets for manual analysis. This not only defeats the purpose of business intelligence but also introduces a lag in information dissemination that brings down the power of these applications.
Configuring BI to deliver exactly what you want can be time-consuming. However, it is a necessary first step to ensure that business teams get alerts and information on vital metrics when it is most useful. Automating the process is thus crucial. In recent times, a growing number of organizations have invested in robotic process automation (RPA) tools to bring down the turnaround time with business intelligence.
360-degree Intelligence
It is not always possible to find a BI tool or build one that does everything that you need it to do at the price point you can afford. In some ways, BI applications are garbage-in, garbage-out’ systems in that the value of the insights provided is only as good as the inputted data. To improve the value of your BI applications, it is important to go beyond what data your BI application can gather. The best use of BI systems come from businesses that use other external data sources to build upon what their BI system can already gather. As the number of accurate data sources increase, your Business Intelligence systems can deliver improved, and more comprehensive insights that can help your business improve performance better.
As a growing number of small and mid-sized businesses adopt BI for their strategy and decision-making processes, Business Intelligence is no longer an optional tool. Businesses need BI more than ever to derive meaningful insights in order to sustain and grow their businesses.
