A 2017 survey of more than 3,000 organizations around the world revealed exactly what companies are prioritizing to meet the goal of “making business intelligence a strategic foundation for growth”: reporting, dashboards, advanced visualization and end user self-service. Companies of all kinds are implementing the latest in data analytics, including healthcare organizations, retailers, manufacturers and more.
When over half of businesses are implementing certain technology, you know it’s worth exploring. Why are business intelligence (BI) solutions in such high demand right now? What potential benefits does better BI unlock for modern organizations?
Here are just three reasons illustrating why companies of all shapes and sizes are currently embracing BI.
Companies Want to Monetize Data
Companies seldom collect data for the sake of sitting on a stockpile of information. Increasingly, companies aim to monetize their data—but doing so requires having the right tools and processes in place. According to MIT Sloan Management Review, one way to monetize data is “improving internal business processes and decisions” based on data insights.
For example, a customer service manager can use a BI tool like a relational search engine to uncover insights relating to customer complaints—then use this information to optimize how their team handles customer communications moving forward. Marketers can dive into data pertaining to campaign performance. Sales leads can use data to refine their customer acquisition strategies.
The point is: Putting self-service data analytics into the hands of employees across an organization allows companies to monetize data in myriad ways. The key is having the BI solutions to turn structured data into actionable business intelligence.
Businesses Face an Analytics Talent Gap
Better business intelligence solutions, specifically those of the self-service variety, are also in high demand because they empower everyone within an organization to derive the insights they need from company data. Legacy systems made IT and data specialists the “gatekeepers” of data. Something as simple as requesting a report could take days, weeks or months. This siloed approach tends to slow down the BI reporting process—not to mention its potential for bogging down IT and data teams with a backlog of requests.
According to some estimates, 40 percent of companies struggle to find and retain the analytics talent they need. In other words, companies are facing a talent gap in terms of hiring enough personnel with the data-related skillsets today’s workplace needs to thrive. Self-service analytics allows non-technical users to uncover insights relevant to their positions, freeing up IT and data analysts to focus on higher-level tasks and strategies.
Organizations Want a Competitive Edge
According to one 2014 study, 84 percent of companies believe data analytics has the potential to “shift the competitive landscape” within their industry. Similarly, 89 percent of respondents believe failure to adopt a data analytics strategy could cause an organization to “lose market share and momentum.”
In other words, the consequences for falling behind on business intelligence is not just losing out on the benefits outlined above—from savvier decision-making to smoother delegation of data-related tasks. Companies don’t exist in a vacuum; benchmarks exist because operating within a given industry means your performance is tied to your competitors’.
If your competitors have access to BI tools that turn their structured data into instantly accessible insights and you don’t, it’s not hard to see who will gain the competitive advantage when it comes to using decision making to drive revenue and reduce inefficiencies.
Business intelligence solutions are in such high demand because they help companies monetize their data, empower employees to access the data insights they need and gain a competitive edge within their industry.
