In a super competitive world we have today every business organization needs to run effectively and efficiently. Business intelligence as a function in every business is a must today.
Business intelligence as a business term might not be familiar to many business managers, however it is the most crucial and important function when it comes to business companies of any size. It is a key factor and the most important one in making sure that the business develops towards the right direction.
It also plays a very significant role in the growth of non profit organizations as well because although their primary goal is not making profit they need to manage effectively and efficiently as well in order to maximize productivity and value for their stakeholders.
In its simple terms, business intelligence can be defined as an organizational ability, capability and skill to collect, categorize and analyze relevant data and convert the data into actionable information which is utilized for achieving business success and growth.
As a result, the benefits of business intelligence are enormous for organizations.
Applying and adapting business intelligence practices and techniques is the way to improve and grow the business for any company in any industry regardless of its size.
It is something that cannot be substituted with anything else and hence it is critical. Today, most of the companies who have understood the importance of business intelligence are enjoying the benefits of having strong competitive advantage, profitability and platform for long-term growth.
While the tools used by various companies are different the benefits are generally the same. The success of business intelligence as a function and the benefits of business intelligence can be achieved not only by using expensive and fancy tools but also by using very simple tools.
The most important ingredient is having a successful business intelligence strategy and the tools which will be used for implementation of the plan are second.
Companies can benefit from the various tools, software, applications available today so they can manage and analyze key data, create key performance metrics (KPIs), develop and track business metrics that drive their profitability and performance in order to predict and shape their future performance – sales, market share, productivity, profit margins, required quality control… and the list goes on.
Organizations can derive results from analyzing the information they create with business intelligence and understand the important future trends to strategically move forward with concrete and proactive plans and strategies. The most important and basic need for any organization is to be able to make better decisions and succeed in implementing those decisions and business intelligence ensures that and much more.
Business intelligence can enable an organization to analyze and get more insight into customer behavior and trends. For any business to succeed, the company has to be able to reach out to their customers and connect with their needs and satisfy their demands.
By understanding their customer behavior the companies can reach more new customers, retain the existing customers and improve customer loyalty by using business intelligence to better understand the customers. Business intelligence also enables the organizations to get the right metrics at the right time, create business dashboards, effective reports and use any kind of relevant data, readily available whenever they need the information.
BI can improve the guesswork that the companies usually do and help companies be more accurate and proactive with it as their prediction is actually based on a data and not only intuition and the past experiences.
Since all the relevant data is ready available, by using Business Intelligence the management and stakeholders can make quick and smart decisions to improve the efficiency of their organizations.
By analyzing the information, they can bring about the required changes and improve their organizational structures to make sure the operations are more streamlined to deliver benefits for the customers. It can also help the companies to better manage their human resources, business processes and productivity in general.
Business Intelligence can help any organization improve. Whether your company is a small organization or large corporation the benefits of business intelligence are worthwhile the required efforts and investments.
Start on a small scale first by looking at the big picture and later go into more depth. Define your key business metrics and KPIs and start gathering the related data and create effective reports. This will help you get everyone on the same page and develop successful business strategies by using BI.