Investing In Business Intelligence Software
By: Martina Burone Risso
Tags: Investing, Technology, Business Intelligence, Data, Data Visualization

A wide range of industries are starting to lean into a data-driven culture, focusing on data, as one of their most important resources for decision-making.

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It is a fact that every company, no matter the size, from start-ups to even more established companies, manage different types and volumes of data. Data can talk, but how can we read it?

When it comes to data, we must understand that originally it will be raw, so it needs to be cleaned up, organized, and analyzed in order to provide us information, so we can communicate something with it. All these processes take time, and as we know, time is non-refundable also representing a cost.

So, what if it is possible to access all the data of business in real-time? Try to imagine, accessing the right information in a matter of seconds, making faster and better decisions. This is what a business intelligence software is about. A business intelligence tool can provide much needed information about a business without relying on IT, in a short period of time and with the right visualizations, that will help us to digest the data and take insights from it.

The Benefits Of Business Intelligence Software

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A real-time business intelligence software will help companies to get access to a huge volume, variety, and sometimes complex data, in just a fraction of seconds in a much easier way. One of the big benefits of BI tools is that they are highly accessible. These tools allow the users to see different types of graphs, dashboards, and visualizations in every kind of device, from any screen you may have in the office, to mobile phones. No matter when or where, the data will be available in real-time.

Real-time business intelligence will also help to improve decision-making by understanding in a more detailed way all the business numbers, metrics and key performance indicators. Having all these daily, weekly, monthly KPIs and contrasting them with previous time periods, short- and long-term trends, historical data for patterns, etc., will allow us to deep dive on the data, extracting amazing insights from it. This will lead not only to an improved metrics performance but also to find possible gaps and areas for improvement.

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Besides discovering new market opportunities, going deeper in the data will also help to identify outliers. These anomalies can be hiding behavioral trends that could probably not be seen, so by discovering them, it will be easier to find those answers we may be looking for. Information can provide answers that can explain the reason for different issues or problems the business has, but we haven’t found before.

Another point worth highlighting is that most of BI tools are self-service software. What this means is that everyone in an organization can have access to crucial business data without requiring high technical knowledge and without relying on other company towers. This gives the final user much more independence, saving a lot of time and resources.

Why Invest In Business Intelligence?

Not everything is about fast analysis, intuitive visualizations, and data-driven decisions. It is also a matter of costs.

As it was mentioned before, it is a matter of reducing costs in a short-term period. Of course, buying and investing in a business intelligence software will require an initial investment, but it will be reflected into an increase in business performance and efficiency.

Therefore, the initial payment will be transformed into a faster route to the goals aimed by the company, which will translate into a significant increase in the profits.

How?

By understanding better our data, we will understand better our business. This means, we will uncover opportunities, as well as areas with place for improvement, cutting costs and, yet again, earning more money.

When to start investing in Business Intelligence Software?

If there is a need of analyzing reports to find points of improvements, grow a certain business and of course, somebody to consume the data of those reports, it could be a first signal that there is a need of a business intelligence software. Business intelligence tools can help to scale business.

A second reason could be the volume and different data sources a business can have. Sometimes data does not come from the same source, so for analyzing and show it all together, it has to be integrated in a same place. This is also possible with a BI tool.

For last but not least, spending a lot of money on adverstising but not analyzing the impact of it, can also be an alarm. Maybe it is time to spend less on advertising and start thinking on investing some of that budget in business intelligence.

Conclusion

Having real-time data will not only improve decision-making but also it will help taking more proactive actions instead of being reactive and moving slower. It is vital to every company to understand their data because this will help to better understand their customers behavior, make better decisions and also learn about mistakes committed in the past in order to not repeat them in the future. With a real-time business intelligence software, all this is possible.

There are many different types of business intelligence tools, from cheaper and more simple ones, to others more expensive and complex. It is all about finding the one that adapts better to your business possibilities and needs.

Sometimes we feel like we need to get more data-driven in our business but we don’t know from where to start.

For me, here is the start…

Let’s take the next step!