Business Intelligence was used in the 1960s to describe a system for sharing information between departments. Commercial intelligence (BI) tools today enable self-service data organization and digital analysis. BI software solutions professionally collect data to help holders and managers make informed business decisions. This critical information will help your company adapt to changes in the industry and market.
The business intellect market is expected to grow to $40.5 billion by 2025. Whether a small business or an enterprise, your business can benefit from BI solutions to stay ahead of the curve, reduce operating costs, and maintain and grow customer relationships.
We’ll examine business analytics, why a business owner needs it, and how BI tells us about competitive and artificial intelligence.
What is Business Analytics?
Business intelligence is not a stand-alone piece of software or even a big data software package. Instead, it is an umbrella term that contains best commercial practices, software, infrastructure, and other tools to optimize decision-making and improve productivity.
Essentially, BI deals with the analysis of information. The database brings together information from different parts of your business, and then applications transform this raw data into reports, charts, and other analysis tools to provide valuable information.
Business owners can use BI in several ways:
- Review any aspect of your business.
- See how well your sales are performing.
- Evaluate the efficiency of your production processes.
- Measure employee performance and company goals.
- Identify and track industry trends using data from multiple departments.
- Inform business leaders who make important decisions throughout the company.
- Track historical data.
- Create your reports based on specific queries.
- Design graphs, charts, etc., based on the collected data.
- Stay competitive in your industry.
How does Business Intelligence Work?
Some of the BI analytics applications are:
- Collaborative Business Intelligence
- Mobile BI
- Open source BI
- SaaS-BI
- Operational BI
- Real-time business intelligence
This technology collects information and provides immediate insight into the data through visualization applications.
BI also offers dashboards and performance metrics. When presented as visualized data, KPIs and business metrics are easier to understand.
How can a small business use business analytics?
Trying to analyze data without BI is clunky. For example, teams often collate information into Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. However, collecting data takes time, and it is tedious to summarize it in an understandable form.
Worse, the results are not always accurate or informative. While Microsoft Excel has many valuable uses, it’s like consuming a hammer when you need a jackhammer. BI tools are more extensive, better, faster, and better suited for solving significant problems, like taking your company to the next level.
Proper data analysis can explain the difference between a modest income and a huge success. Proper analytics gives you several essential capabilities:
- Get an idea of the trends. Analytics provide insight into industry trends and help identify compelling marketing opportunities you might miss.
- Provide better customer service. Customer analytics can help you learn what your company wants and needs. This information can help you revamp your business to attract more customers.
Benefits of Business Intelligence Integration
BI tools can help take your commercial to the next level. By increasing the productivity of your workforce and educating the customer experience, BI tools deliver the data you need to make proactive business decisions.
Controlled Accountability
BI tools can assign tasks and reports to teams and individuals to create a trackable accountability system within a business. Holding your team accountable can grow loyalty by giving each employee a clear understanding of their role and reducing confusion between departments.
Improved performance
BI tools improve productivity in several ways:
- Companies of any size can create their reports.
- Automated data can increase cash flow by reducing labor and resource costs.
- By automating busy work, workers can be more productive and efficient.
- Frequent reporting can remove the need for an IT team and consultants.
Optimized processes
BI gives companies access to a wide range of data that can help optimize business processes, reduce bottlenecks, and set measurable standards. You can use real-time data reports, leading to better and faster business decisions. For example, team members can review detailed customer information and forecasts before a sales meeting. As a result, it is easier to communicate with the customer and conduct business more professionally.
Competitive advantage
Using BI tools to analyze client data can help you determine how to attract customers, anticipate hot spots and sales declines, and track manufacturing and market changes. Anticipating your customers’ needs is a substantial advantage and can help you stay one stage ahead to achieve maximum profit potential.
Improving customer experience
BI tools will also help your customers. By connecting phone records, text data from chats, and previous purchases, you can offer excellent customer service while using historical data to resolve issues.
Disadvantages of Business Intelligence Integration
Although BI tools have many benefits, their implementation is complex, especially for small businesses. There are a few things to consider before you dive.
- Cost: BI tools can be expensive and require a significant upfront investment. The return on investment may pay for the price, but usually not within the first year. If economics is a concern, consider using self-service BI tools. These tools will help you move your business forward without IT support needing to adapt or make minor adjustments.
- Complexity: Depending on the level of expertise of your business tool, you may need to hire a team for onboarding and initial training. Additionally, the data may become confusing and overlap if you use different BI products and try to integrate them. Find a comprehensive BI solution that can accommodate all the tools you need. Or find a third-party data connector to make sense of the disparate information you get from different BI tools.
- Safety. If you invest in BI tools containing data about your customers and employees, any error in your system could result in this information falling into the wrong hands. Choose a BI company with the best security practices to reduce the risk of data breaches and carefully decide what data you will allow your BI tools to access.
- Employee resistance. Implementing new tools across departments can face obstacles. While some departments may quickly get up to speed and find BI tools that save them time and knowledge, others may struggle and abandon them entirely. Look for intuitive software, resolve employee complaints, and have clear actions and goals. The more employees use these tools, the easier it is to maintain data and profit from your analysis.
Commercial Intelligence Vs. Competitive intelligence vs. business analytics
BI is repeatedly considered synonymous with cheap intelligence and is also confused with business intelligence. However, there are some essential differences.
- Business Intelligence: BI increases your competitive advantage. It uses various technologies to analyze internal data and analyze business processes. BI collects data through queries, reports, and online analytics.
- Competitive intelligence. Market-oriented competitive intelligence uses data differently. Information is collected, analyzed, and disseminated to understand how to gain an advantage over competitors.
- Analytics Business. Business intelligence is related to competitive intelligence and can be considered part of it. Business analytics deals with analytical modeling, and its tools are figures and measurable measurements.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Business Intelligence
BI and false intelligence (AI) overlap in their technology applications. BI and AI tools produce valuable data from their analytics, allowing businesses to transform that data into informed business decisions.
However, their goals differ significantly. BI tools simplify data collection while automating frequency and improving the use of data in a business. Your team can collect and aggregate this data using BI tools across departments to make informed business decisions.
On the other hand, artificial intelligence tools are being developed to simulate human intelligence through rational decision-making. For example, AI chatbots can replace customer service representatives under certain circumstances. While this doesn’t necessarily improve B2C relationships, it can fill the real-time gap for simple questions or concerns.
