Why is Business Intelligence Important for Your Organization?

Business Intelligence (BI) solutions are becoming an essential part of every company’s operations. They enable businesses to transform massive amounts of data into useful insights. Organizations use BI to identify company trends and implement processes to simplify various activities and services.

Business intelligence refers to the ability of an organization to make informed judgments, choose measured actions, and implement proficient business progressions. By utilizing BI effectively, the organization gets access to actionable data, gains valuable insights into industry trends, and enables a strategic decision-making approach.

Below are a few stats that tell the increasing use of Business Intelligence.

• As per Mordor Intelligence, the Business Intelligence Market was valued at USD 20.516 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach USD 40.50 billion by 2026 to grow at a CAGR of 12% over the forecast period (2021-2026). 

• According to the same report, North America is predicted to have the largest market share in BI from 2020-2025, due to the presence of key industry players in the area. Factors such as rising competition, intense technological R&D, and a growing trend of data proliferation are aiding the market’s expansion in the country.

• According to Datanyze, the global market size of the Business Intelligence industry is 236,320 companies, and there are 273 companies producing Business Intelligence technologies.

Organizations must be flexible in today’s business environment to keep ahead of the competition and cater to a constantly changing consumer base. In both of these critical tasks, BI is a valuable asset, that’s why we have provided the answer to the much-hyped question – why is business intelligence important for your organization? Before answering the why, let’s quickly understand what is BI all about.

What is Business Intelligence?

Business Intelligence is a technology-driven process that helps transform data into actionable insights, thereby allowing companies to make more strategic business decisions..

Business Intelligence enables firms to swiftly extract meaningful insights from old and current data. This is made feasible via business intelligence tools, which process big data sets from many sources and deliver insights in visually appealing ways that are easy to grasp and distribute.

This method is perfect to ensure that company managers, corporate leaders, and even startup owners make informed business decisions. BI is mostly used for generating and producing new prospects that will aid in the expansion of the firm, as well as enhance profits and overall turnover. Below are some departments where the use of BI has increased.

Marketing

A business intelligence (BI) solution allows your organization’s marketing team to develop better marketing campaigns with a higher return on investment (ROI) through easy access to data from current and previous campaigns. BI solution also provides essential campaign metrics like customer acquisition cost (CAC), cost per lead (CPL), and campaign click-through rates (CTR) required for a successful marketing campaign.

Sales

BI helps increase your organization’s sales by predicting the sales cycle and analyzing the conversion rates and total income. BI can assist your sales team by recognizing what’s working and what’s not, resulting in drastically enhanced sales performance.

By keeping track of your customers’ data, BI provides you a better understanding of how they interact with your company on a deeper level. This further gives you the opportunity to resolve consumer issues and reach out to them with tailored messages to drive sales.

Finance  

Finance departments can benefit from BI by having crucial and in-depth insights into financial data. BI can also be used to track quarterly and annual budgets, identify possible issues before they have severe consequences, and improve the overall business health and financial stability of a firm.

Why Business Intelligence Matters to Your Organization

By displaying current and historical data business intelligence assists firms in making better decisions. Analysts use BI to provide performance and competitive benchmarks, which helps the company to run smoothly and efficiently. Below are a few of the reasons why BI is used in organizations.

Rapid Decision Making

The most crucial factor to consider when making any business decision is having sufficient evidence to support the conclusion. 

BI helps in establishing business goals for the benefit of the organization. The various uses of BI tools such as examining and evaluating raw data  (with comprehensive representation) help in making quick and better decisions.

For example, a retail company using business intelligence and analytics can forecast purchases and deliver personalized offers to customers via their app and email. This strategy encourages existing consumers to visit the store more frequently, resulting in increased revenue. This results in higher consumer satisfaction and positive brand connotations.

ROI and Goal Improvement

For example, a centralized business intelligence implementation and solution automates reporting operations. It also allows the broader marketing team to create tailored digital marketing efforts for specific regions. The team can react to customer behaviors and optimize marketing campaigns if they monitor and track real-time data. The end result is improved conversion rates and customer retention.

Improvement in Business Operations

Traditional reports are static and become outdated in no time. Yet, companies have to depend on monthly and annual reports to make key business decisions. BI reporting, on the other hand, allows everyone to access data, conduct analysis and create personalized reports. The BI reporting is also dynamic, allowing users to select a specific metric and analyse the data.  

For instance, if we talk about online purchases, then the data insights on percentage of clients that abandon their carts, rather than the number of transactions, can lead to an actionable measure. The company can see where customers are leaving and take the required steps to lower the cart abandonment rate.

Another business intelligence example is the problem that the pharmaceutical industry is currently facing, which is keeping track of the expiration dates of the pharmaceuticals they store. BI software can assist in reducing the danger of expired products being sold to clients unintentionally. 

Enhanced Productivity

Employee productivity can be boosted by centralizing company data. One of the benefits of Business Intelligence management and analytics tools is the automation of processes such as report generation and real-time updation. As a result, the personnel may focus on more productive tasks.

For example, the use of a business intelligence platform is a vital concern in the energy industry, particularly in the fossil fuel environment, such as the oil market. Many businesses utilize their business intelligence systems to analyze geological data quickly. Had it been a manual task, a lot of time and effort would have gone just to analyze the data. Businesses can utilize predictive analytics to find where the largest oil discoveries are expected to be through trend analysis and the utilization of diverse sources of information.

Improved Efficiency

Having a good business intelligence system in place greatly enhances the overall efficiency of the company. This, in turn, has a favorable impact on the organization’s overall revenue. Making useful data available to various teams within the organization minimizes report request wait time and boosts the productivity of all teams within the organization. Data should not be restricted to a few privileged teams but should be available to all. This keeps everyone in the company informed and allows them to make informed decisions.

For example, telecom companies lookout for measures to improve quality assurance. After using BI, the companies can maintain data processing and gain significant insights from the raw data they collect. Companies can even concentrate on predicting client requirements and developing innovative retention techniques.

Sales & Market Intelligence

Most of the sales and marketing teams use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to keep a track of their customers. There is a lot of data that can be evaluated and applied for strategic efforts as they incorporate all customer contacts and interactions. BI systems assist businesses in a variety of ways, including discovering new clients, tracking and maintaining existing customers, and offering after-sale services.

For example, companies can leverage BI tactics to undertake sales win/loss analysis. Business intelligence implementation can help you identify new income prospects and deliver actionable insights by analyzing your internal and external processes. For example, having a better understanding of current market trends may enable you to spot a previously unnoticed sales opportunity.

Competitive Advantage

Another significant advantage of having a BI solution is competitive advantage. Business intelligence platform allows companies to see what their competitors are up to and make informed and educated decisions about their plans. Furthermore, a corporation that keeps a constant watch on its internal systems stays ahead of a company that does not.

For example, the capacity to follow and identify key trends is the most important benefit of business intelligence in the fashion industry. When it comes to selecting a design that has the potential to become a global trend, making informed decisions is critical. Buyers and marketing specialists can use tools related to business intelligence and analytics to figure out what kind of audience they need to appeal to.

Real World BI Use Cases

BI can enhance business processes by providing a broad perspective about their goals and empowering teams to evaluate their own data and make better decisions. Now that we have known the importance of BI. Let’s now have a look at the real-world examples of BI.

Amazon

Amazon uses BI tools and technologies to personalize product recommendations and sell products, as well as to make logistical business decisions. Amazon’s huge supply chain runs smoothly thanks to in-depth data analysis.

Data and business intelligence technologies have a major impact on Amazon’s supply chain, i.e. from optimizing shipping routes to allocating inventory.

Coca-Cola

Coca-Cola benefits from its social media data, which includes 35 million Twitter followers and 105 million Facebook likes. The corporation can detect when images of its drinks are posted online using AI-powered image recognition technology. This information, combined with the dominance of BI, allows the company to learn more about who are drinking their beverages, where they are, and why they are mentioning the brand online.

The data is used to provide consumers with personalized advertising, which is four times more likely to result in a click than a generic ad.

Netflix

With 148 million customers, this online entertainment company has a significant BI advantage. The question that arises is, what is Netflix’s approach to business intelligence?

Netflix employs data in a variety of ways. The most popular business intelligence example is how the organization develops and tests new programming concepts based on previously seen shows. BI used by Netflix encourages the customers or users to interact with its content. The service is so good at promoting targeted content that its recommendation system is responsible for over 80% of all streamed content.

American Express

The fintech industry is the one where BI has proven to be most effective. In this industry, American Express has been a forerunner in using BI to produce innovative payment service solutions and sell offers to clients. American Express makes use of BI to take effective actions to retain customers who are otherwise thinking of closing their accounts.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What is BI?

Ans. Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process for assessing data and supplying actionable information to leaders, managers, and employees to help them make better business decisions.

Q2. Why is business intelligence important?

Ans. Since BI involves collection and distribution of information, thus, it provides a large amount of measurable data to make decisions and build new products.

The reason why BI is important is because businesses leverage business intelligence to identify major events and monitor company trends in order to promptly respond to their changing environment. You can enhance decision-making and tactical strategic management processes in your organization if you implement great business intelligence strategies.

Business intelligence provides the tools to metricize both what’s going on in your company and what might happen in the future.

Q3. How to use business intelligence?

Ans. There are numerous business intelligence solutions available today that can assist you in tracking important KPIs. Data analytics and business analytics are included in business intelligence, however, they are only used as part of the overall process. Here are some ways in which you can implement business intelligence in your organization:

• Collect business information quickly and efficiently 
• Align performance indicators with business strategies
• Achieve meaningful customer insights 
• Track sales information
• Increase employee productivity

Q4. What are some business intelligence use cases?

Ans. Some business intelligence use cases are:

• Analytics
• Dashboard development
• Data mining
• Process mining
• Business performance management
• Text mining
• Predictive analytics
• Prescriptive analytics
• Data visualization

The Future Role of Business Intelligence

As business intelligence is constantly growing in response to changing corporate needs and technological advancements, we at Appinventiv identify current trends to keep users informed about the new developments. You should also know that artificial intelligence and machine learning will continue to advance and that firms may include AI-derived technologies and insights into a larger business intelligence and analytics strategy. 

Companies’ efforts to exchange data and collaborate will grow as they strive to become more data-driven. Data visualization will become even more important as teams and departments collaborate. This article is merely a primer on the subject of business intelligence and analytics. If you want to know how BI can help your business, then kindly contact us. We are happy to help! 🙂

THE AUTHOR

Sudeep Srivastava

Co-Founder and Director