Business intelligence (BI) is one of the hottest technology trends. Business intelligence tools transform data into actionable insights that can help companies make strategic business decisions. Let’s look at the 10 key benefits of Business Intelligence software.

Business Intelligence:  What It is, How It Works and Why BI Tools matter?

Living in a technology-driven world, you can observe and experience the speed of digital transformation of everything that surrounds you. 

Most companies find that it is data that will inevitably regain a competitive advantage. If you do not collect and correctly analyze data about your business, you will quickly lose customers and be left behind. 

Fortunately, there is a tool that can help you, and it is business intelligence. If you want to know how BI tools work, why BI matter and how they can help you stay competitive, read till the end.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is a set of tools, applications, operations, and technologies that collect data and display it in graphical form for you to browse and make better use of data to improve the quality of decision-making.

Visualizing data is an excellent way to make it easier for you and your company to understand the current state of the business.

Business intelligence can help organizations analyze historical and current data so that organizations can quickly discover feasible insights that can drive strategic decisions.

However, business intelligence does not perform data analysis itself but enables you to obtain information about the organization, run queries against that information, generate understandable reports, and draw conclusions. Displaying data in graphical form can help you understand your company and discover business opportunities that you may have missed.

Business intelligence began with decision support systems (DSS is a computerized program used to support determinations, decisions, judgments, and courses of action in an organization or company) and developed rapidly with the popularization of computers in the early days. Let’s take a look at how business intelligence tools work to help decision-makers drive business growth.

How Does Business Intelligence Work?

Business intelligence is a type of software that combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, etc. and provides historical, current, and predictive views of business operations, and transforms data into actionable insights. These insights can help companies look at big data easily, develop useful metrics, identify market trends and make strategic business decisions.

Business intelligence tools shorten the time you usually spend on mining, merging, and analyzing data, so that you can gain valuable intelligence about your business. 

BI solution provides you with accurate real-time information in the form of charts, graphs, dashboards, and maps, enabling you to turn it into insights. Visualizing data is a great way to better view and understand the state of the organization.

However, different aspects of the monitoring business require different data sets. Moreover, the data may come from different sources. Business intelligence enables you to decide which part of the business process to analyze and what kind of information to obtain. 

Before you start using the BI tool, it’s best to identify the problems your business is facing and remember that business intelligence cannot solve the problems for you.

It’s worth noting that business intelligence gives you access to information about business operations and customer behavior that is happening now rather than in the future. It does not predict future opportunities, but it allows you to do just that base the predictions on processes and decisions to date.

Why Business Intelligence Matters: The Top 10 Reasons

Business intelligence is a great way to discover new things about the company. If you want to develop useful metrics and implement processes, architectures, and technologies successfully, you need to know exactly the type of data to be collected or already collected and the insights to receive.

What can be achieved through the use of business intelligence tools is a key factor in business prosperity. Although you may not see results at first, making data-based decisions and thus improving inefficient business operations can help you succeed in the long term. 

Let’s look at the 10 key reasons why business intelligence tools matter. BI tools enable you to:

1. Improve efficiency and productivity

Obtaining important business indicators takes hours to look up information from multiple databases. However, collecting data does not mean having a deeper understanding of your business. There are still many mergers, reports, and analysis results. Business intelligence tools automate all these processes to provide you with accurate real-time information, save the time you can now spend on more challenging tasks, and improve efficiency and productivity.

2. Track customer behavior

Every company depends on its customers. You don’t need to run an online store to be interested in customers, their actions, and opinions. 

Tracking every stage of the entire sales cycle and in-depth understanding of customer behavior can enable you to literally turn information into profit. With the help of business intelligence, you can discover your customers’ preferences to meet their needs.

3. Discover new opportunities

Business intelligence tools provide you with actionable information that can help you create a successful strategic plan. This allows you to view the efficiency of the business process and makes it possible for you to discover everything that may slow down the company’s development. 

You can also learn more about customers, their behavior, and the entire sales cycle, which allows you to take different approaches and discover which approach is best for the company.

4. Eliminate guesswork

When conducting business analytics, never make important business decisions based on your intuition. In this way, you may slow down the company’s development speed, or even risk the future. With business intelligence, you can gain comprehensive, reliable real-time insights about your organization, so you can make accurate, data-driven decisions. This eliminates the need to make the best guess.

5. Help companies warn of risks

Enterprises can set data alarm thresholds in the business intelligence system. Once the data exceeds the standard, the system will notify the administrator by various means to make the enterprise risk controllable and reduce security vulnerabilities.

6. Save business history

One of the most important functions that business intelligence tools can provide is normative analysis. 

BI solution itself cannot predict future trends in the market or customer behavior, but it can help you estimate future predictions based on historical data. 

When you store enough information, the tool can merge, analyze and display the main trends in the past, and give you insight into which business operations have made you successful.

7. Work anytime, anywhere

Since all valuable insights are stored in the cloud, any member of the organization can access them anytime, anywhere. You no longer need to spend time sharing updates, because everyone can view real-time information without searching countless files. By the way, you no longer need to create files because business intelligence can do all the work for you.

8. Turn goals into results

Business intelligence provides you with higher-quality data so that you can increase your strategic awareness.

With accurate real-time information, your company can not only establish reasonable goals but also actually achieve them. By automating data collection, you can also reduce operating costs and estimate how much your team needs to handle challenging tasks. Overall, you will understand what the company can achieve and what prevents you from turning it into a result.

9. Increase sales

Business intelligence collects and analyzes data about customer behavior, efficiency at each stage of the product development process, and market trends.

By obtaining insightful sales information and understanding your customers, you can meet their needs and promote sales.  

BI also helps to improve after-sales service, which has a great impact on building your own brand and winning new customers.

10. Improve business performance

Business intelligence provides a high degree of self-service, which turns every employee into a decision-maker to maximize business value. When employees have relevant real-time information, they can make data-driven, wise decisions that affect company profits and improve business efficiency.

This also improves access to key information, increases return on investment, promotes strategic decision-making, eliminates waste, identifies business opportunities in advance, and pushes business to an unprecedented level.

Conclusion: 

Business intelligence tools are inevitable solutions that can help you make data-based decisions to gain a competitive advantage. Exploring data is a great way to regain a competitive advantage. BI tools can help you explore and understand the nature of the company. Analyzing the data displayed in graphs can increase the productivity of the company and enable you to grow.

Remember! Business intelligence is not an analytical tool that can tell you what will happen in the future. It collects and displays data in graphical form, so you can see the current state of your business because visualization is a great way to explore information. 

Predicting the future is important, but it will be useless if you do not accurately understand the current business conditions.