Decoding enterprise business intelligence: Opportunities and possibilities

Business intelligence has been intrinsically linked to a successful business. This is why many enterprises have started incorporating business intelligence tools into their holistic business strategy. The general expectation from a BI solution is that it should offer a versatile platform where large volumes of data from multiple sources can be quickly processed, accessed, and visualized.

In a study conducted by Statista, the market size for business intelligence tools and solutions is forecasted to reach about $18 billion in 2024. From this figure, it is quite evident that business intelligence is gaining immense popularity in the business world. Many organizations have experienced boosted revenue generation and improved business efficiency with BI tools. For instance, Coca-Cola automated manual reporting processes, saving over 260 hours a year—more than six 40-hour work weeks with their BI platform. 

Source: Statista – Growth of enterprise business intelligence market

Now, as a business owner, there may be an initial confusion as to whether a business intelligence tool would make a noticeable difference in your organization. You may also have questions about how to begin the implementation of such technology.  In this article, we will take a look at the various opportunities that business intelligence provides to businesses. We will also talk about what you will need to consider before integrating a BI solution in your organization and how to get started. 

Now before jumping into implementation strategies, let us take a look at what business intelligence is and how it works. 

What is enterprise business intelligence?

How did the concept of enterprise business intelligence come into existence? It all started with inaccurate or missing information that would lead to misinformed decision making. Managers began realizing that they would be able to make much better decisions if they had the right data and information to work with. This is essentially what business intelligence is. It provides enterprises, companies with key insights so that they can make informed decisions. This occurs through the collection, storage, and analysis of the data produced by a company’s activities. BI is a broad term that encompasses data mining, process analysis, performance benchmarking, and descriptive analytics. 

Most organizations have extremely large volumes of unstructured data, which makes it very challenging to collect and analyze. Therefore, many business intelligence solutions have cropped up in the market to help these companies optimize the information gleaned from data and present cohesive reports, performance measures, and trends that inform management decisions.

BI tools go a long way in helping organizations identify new opportunities and implement effective strategies based on key insights. Some of the major capabilities of a BI tool include:

• Data preparation: Compiling multiple data sources, identifying the dimensions and measurements, preparing them for data analysis. Preparing the data can be quite challenging, especially for big enterprises. A typical enterprise will have numerous data sources such as sales data, procurement and purchase orders, customer data, etc. The challenge here is to bring together all these data so that an AI engine can analyze it, and produce insights from it. To get a deeper understanding of data preparation, you can check this article What is Big Data Ingestion?
• Data mining: The use of databases, statistics, and machine learning to identify trends in large datasets.
• Reporting: Shares the analysis of data with stakeholders so they can make informed decisions
• Performance metrics and benchmarking: Compares current performance data to historical data to track performance against goals
• Querying: BI tools can extract answers from datasets.
• Statistical analysis: Analyzing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind a certain trend based on statistics. Manually parsing through data can be extremely tedious. That’s where AI comes in. In a previous article about business data analytics, we saw how AI and machine learning, leading to the efficient analysis of enterprise data at breakneck speeds.
• Data visualization: Turning data analysis into visual representations such as charts, graphs, and histograms to more easily consume data.
• Visual analysis: Exploring data through visual storytelling

In order to make the use of BI tools more clear, let us look at an example of a company that leveraged a BI tool for improved business performance. Charles Schwab, a financial services company adopted a business intelligence tool to gain access to a comprehensive outline of their branches across the country. This helped them analyze performance metrics and detect new areas of opportunity. This platform helped Schwab see all of its branch data in an organized manner. It allowed bench managers to track if a region’s performance is above or below average and click in to see the branches that are driving that region’s performance. This leads to more opportunities for optimization along with better customer service for clients. 

How does it work?

Every business has a set of organizational goals. In order to achieve these goals, they must track their performance by gathering the required data, analyzing it, and determining what actions need to be taken. Generally, organizations need to follow the following steps for business intelligence-

• Raw and unstructured data is extracted from the corporate database. This data usually comes from various different sources and departments.
• The gathered data is cleaned, filtered, and stored in the data warehouse. 
• Companies can use a BI tool to ask questions, request ad-hoc reports, or conduct any other analysis.

BI tools make use of advanced AI algorithms to acquire key insights that may be useful for the business. For example, we developed a BI solution for ADNEC (Abu Dhabi National Exhibitions Company). This solution helped them improve their facility management to a large extent by making use of computer vision technology and machine learning algorithms to detect visitor traffic, abnormal events, customer emotions, in-premise user journey tracking, etc from real-time videos. This helped the management make data-driven decisions for the arrangements of facilities. The solution also identified security threats and recurring customers. All of this was done through advanced algorithms that were trained with data sets to produce a rule-based outcome. 

Possibilities of BI

There are several reasons behind the adoption of BI solutions. They can support business processes like hiring, compliance, production, and marketing. They also allow companies to benefit from more accurate reporting and analysis, improved data quality, better employee satisfaction, reduced costs, increased revenues, and the ability to make better business decisions. Some of the primary ways through which business intelligence can help companies make better decisions include-

• Identify ways to increase profit
• Analyze customer behavior
• Compare data with competitors
• Track performance
• Optimize operations
• Predict success
• Spot market trends
• Discover issues or problems

BI solutions can help various departments in your business. They are often used in organizations for- 

• Closed deal analysis: BI solutions can provide companies with comprehensive reports on past deals. Such reports can detect similarities between past deals. This will allow you to make conclusions about why certain deals are or are not closing. You will also be able to discern which stakeholders you have more success with, and craft a target group accordingly. 
• Contact and interaction analytics: Analysis of customer interactions are extremely important. Especially in retail sector where you can use retail data analytics. Interaction analytics solutions can monitor calls made and automatically identify key audio patterns to produce information on the best phrases to use during customer interaction. They can also detect speech patterns and phrases used in calls that did not result in a successful outcome alerting you to issues and behaviors that need to be changed. You will also be able to ensure compliance, as the solution will alert you in case of any inappropriate language use. 
• Website traffic: By gaining an insight into website performance, businesses can easily understand opportunities for improvement. Companies can set up reports and email alerts to see data like time spent on page, referral page, and the type of traffic. Google Analytics and other similar tools can also show you the visitor’s web domain helping you see which companies are going onto your site and which pages they are interacting with. 

How to get started with business intelligence

There are many business intelligence tools and platforms in the market today. They help in streamlining the analysis process and improve decision making for many organizations. This makes it easier for people to see and understand their data without the technical know-how to dig into the data themselves. BI tools can also aid in ad hoc reporting, data visualization, and creating customized dashboards for multiple levels of users.

However, many of these business intelligence tools have generalized features that are not specific to a particular organization. This means that they do not perform very well when compared to customized business solutions. This is why companies should ideally hire a development partner that can help them build a solution that is tailored to their specific needs and requirements. 

A good development partner will provide you with the following services-

• Requirement analysis: This involves the analysis of your business requirements to understand the problem at hand. 
• Design: In this phase, the system and software design is prepared from the requirement specifications which were studied in the first phase.
• Development: This phase involves the actual development of the BI solution based on the approved design
• Testing: After the code is developed it is tested against the requirements to make sure that the solution works as expected
• Deployment: Here, the solution is finally deployed and its performance is assessed
• Support and maintenance: Support services are important, in case the solution faces and problems in the future

Adopting a BI solution can be a hectic task if you don’t have any technical support. Our team of experts is always ready to help you out in case you have any doubts. Reach out to us today.