Using data more effectively has always been the core goal of business intelligence, but a business intelligence platform makes this process more efficient, leading to a completely new relationship with data.
The average company produces around 162.9 terabytes of data. According to Forrester’s finding, “between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics”. This precisely explains why modern companies despite having a lot of data are unable to use it well.
Business intelligence platforms solve this problem by helping your company manage and understand what’s going on with those large volumes of data. Data takes on a new meaning by helping you
- make better products
- serve your customers better
- run a more efficient business by identifying potential issues before they become bigger problems.
Table of Contents
What should a business intelligence platform do?
A business intelligence platform should help your company gather, examine and visualize your data. The goal is to develop a data-driven culture that empowers every employee with the ability to identify valuable insights.
1. Gather data
Companies use an average of 400 data sources across their organization to feed their BI competencies. BI platforms should gather data from all those sources in one place in order to make sense of what’s happening.
When choosing a BI platform, look for these 4 parameters.
Integrate many data sources: BI platforms should be able to integrate multiple databases, data warehouses and CSV files.
Clean data and manage data quality: Data quality management is one of the top BI trends gaining importance. Different data sets need to be made intelligible and therefore, usable. BI platforms should help in maintaining that quality and speed up the process of cleaning poor-quality data.
Blend data: BI platforms should make it simple to blend data and gain a complete overview of all your data sources.
Ensure compliance and security: BI platforms should help you manage your data in a secure and compliant way.
2. Understand data
A BI platform should help you understand your data. It should give you the ability to sort through, organize and query your data.
When choosing a BI platform, look for these 3 parameters.
Model and organize data: With all of that data centralized, you need an efficient way to organize it. For instance, relationships that work for your business. You can use features like data stores, which can be thought of as customized and curated mini databases to solve the specific needs of your teams.
Query data: Every user of the BI platform should have an easy way of querying the data to get the answers they need immediately.
Perform exploratory data analysis (EDA): BI platforms should allow users, such as data analysts and scientists, to go as deep as they need to in order to test their hypotheses. This includes features like drill downs, data pipeline control and data stores for frequently used transformations.
3. Visualize data
It’s not sufficient for your data to be understandable — it should also be usable. BI platforms should make it easy to collaborate and act on the insights after you gather and understand them.
When choosing a BI platform, look for these 3 parameters.
Share your findings with dynamic dashboards: After modeling, cleaning and querying all your data, BI platforms should help you create custom, dynamic dashboards to visualize what’s happening with your data in real-time. Even better if you can manipulate and interact with these dashboards without any coding knowledge
Collaborate and communicate. Many people across your organization will use the same BI platform, so the ability to collaborate and comment within the platform and even within dashboards is vital. Setting up custom alerts will also keep leaders, teams, and even the entire organization informed of certain important developments
Work with other technology. BI platform is just one, even though important, part of your tech stack, which means it needs to work well with the other tools you use. This includes where it gets data from and where you share your dashboards. A good BI platform should be able to embed interactive dashboards just about anywhere, including, Salesforce, Confluence and your website.
The outcome: homogenized data
A BI platform produces a culture of data democracy, where employees have access to the data they need, when they need it, to make smarter decisions faster.
The task of managing the flow of data – from gathering, understanding to visualizing – has been assigned to overstretched data and IT teams. BI platforms make these tasks easier (and even automatic, in some cases), so these teams can focus on more meaningful tasks, like analysis, acting on insights and the likes.
The other benefit of using a BI platform is that you don’t need a technical background to query data or create reports. Everyone, from C-level executives, marketing specialists to new sales reps, can use the data available to make better decisions and collaborate efficiently.
The impact of democratized data can be immediate as well as long-lasting.
Reddit was able to improve their sales dramatically by giving their sales team access to data about discussions happening in various subreddit communities.
Munchery eliminated their data bottleneck, freeing up time, which allowed their data analysts to be proactive rather than reactive.
With the right BI platform, homogenized data can become your company’s competitive advantage, thereby improving efficiency, collaboration and decision-making.
Popular BI tools
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Evolution of business intelligence platforms
Business intelligence has evolved drastically in the last two decades and it’s the most evident in the big changes ushered in by the BI platform.
Mobile BI
Mobile Business Intelligence (BI) extends the decision-making and analytics capabilities of conventional BI beyond the office. The ubiquity of smartphones and tablet devices has rendered this form of BI as one of the most viable means of accessing and extracting value from data today in any location.
Embedded BI
Embedded BI is the integration of reports, dashboards and data visualizations inside an application. The information is typically displayed and managed by a BI platform and is placed directly within the application’s user interface to improve data usability and decision-making. This adoption puts data at the fingertips of users and leads to greater insights and smarter actions.
Self Service BI
Self-service business intelligence allows people in your enterprise to analyze business data and present the information from that analysis without relying on IT or BI teams. By offering self-service BI, you can help optimize the decision-making capability across your organization by giving users a single source of truth within a business intelligence environment.
Conversational BI
Conversational analytics, also known as conversational BI, leverages natural language processing (NLP) technology that allows you to obtain data and business metrics via chatbots or voice bots placed on your third-party messaging apps. You may ask questions, like “What was my sales in North America last year?” or request the bot to show a graph of the past 5-year expenses, on your enterprise messenger, without logging into your enterprise system or sifting through multiple apps.
What should you consider when choosing a business intelligence platform?
When you evaluate business intelligence platforms, be mindful of companies whose core mission is to empower people to be data-driven. Has the company invested years of research and development into its analytics platform? Does its history indicate the company will continue to innovate? Does it prioritize user experience to help customers drive adoption?
Choose a platform that can easily scale as your company grows. At Data Semantics, we understand that business realities are constantly evolving and we are constantly on the lookout for upcoming trends in business intelligence to inform BI users. The right platform for your organization will be flexible, easy to use and should help you reach your business goals.
We recently made a checklist you can refer to when choosing a business intelligence tool, explaining the different types of BI tools, their strengths and weaknesses and describing who they’re best for. If you’re curious about business intelligence platforms, we encourage you to speak to our in-house experts.
