As an executive, manager, or corporate end user it’s your duty to on a regular basis take important business decisions that must be informed. You, therefore, need to be well-armed for this all-important task with BI.
Business intelligence (BI) comes as a technology-driven process for analyzing data and presenting actionable information with a wide variety of tools, applications, and methodologies that will enable your brand to assemble data procured internally or externally. The data you have so collected can then be prepared for analysis, developed, and even tested.
Based on your outcome, you can go ahead to create reports, dashboards, and data visualizations to make the analytical results available for your corporate decision-making. With BI, you are assured of amazingly growing your brand in the following seven ways.
1. Accelerating and improving decision making
BI puts you in the stead of avoiding cognitive heuristics whereby, you ensure that you don’t make decisions based on just very few information at your disposal or even making use of limited information when you have enough. You will not have to regularly make decisions based on just a few facts or what first comes to mind based on your previous experience and knowledge.
It’s important that you are aware of your susceptibility to cognitive heuristics and take that into account when making important decisions. BI offers you the opportunity to seek more information than you think you needed in the first place.
You can only achieve very little without a decision being made, so it’s absolutely important for the brand to ensure that everyone is able to make decisions quickly and skilfully. Prolonging decision making only results in wastage and loss of morale.
In this competitive global market, this is more important than ever before.
Inasmuch as some certain decisions must be left for the C-suite, for everyday challenges, however, the agility of each person’s judgments is vital for a company to run smoothly.
It’s expected that you may have to dwell more on certain decisions as you may need to seek the opinion of others before arriving at any conclusion. A poor decision can harm the brand very badly.
2. Optimizing internal business processes
BI affords you the opportunity of optimizing your internal business processes with the attendant view of reaping the following rewards:
- Market compliance
- Streamlined operations
- Reduced risks
- Well-used resources
- Consistency
- Assured quality
- End-to-end visibility
With BI you are able to embark on a holistic approach of processes optimization that involves identifying, analyzing, implementing, and monitoring. As a part of business practice management (BPM), once you optimize your processes you end up optimizing your business goals.
3. Increasing operational efficiency
The information you gather by applying BI enables you to boost operational efficiency. According to Laurie McCabe, vice president of small and medium-sized business (SMB) insights and solutions for research firm AMI-Partners, “Sooner or later, any company not operating efficiently will be out of business.”
With the BI technology securely in place, your brand’s operational efficiency is assured by:
- Developing a long-term technology plan.
- Improving employee retention and satisfaction.
- Outsourcing IT tasks.
- Reducing unproductive travel time.
- Streamlining communications with customers.
- Enabling employees to take their phone systems wherever they go.
- Making it easy to collaborate.
- Creating effective business processes with partners.
- Delivering anytime, anywhere access to mobile employees.
- Providing employees with secure, consistent access to information
BI technology can play a big role in planning future operations, as well as measuring the past.
Once you are armed with the right data and unarguably right performance measures that are delivered to the right people at the right time these can underpin dramatic sustained improvements in team productivity inasmuch as the team is geared towards acting on them.
4. Driving new revenues
The sole focus of your brand is to satisfy customers and that invariably translates to ROI. It’s not all about pushing marketing to onboard more prospects but rather working assiduously on increasing the proficiency of your sales staff.
BI unlocks the key to financial metrics you use to monitor organizational activities on a real-time basis. By applying these financial metrics, you are able to identify and develop the revenue and cost drivers of each business unit or activities which ensure that the brand acts like one whole unit.
If you are able to discover what activities influence your revenues and costs you are assured of managing brand strategies for your ongoing and possibly new business.
5. Gaining competitive advantages over business rivals
You will be able to determine what makes your product or services superior to all of a customer’s other choices. BI puts all the following three determinants in clear perspectives.
- Benefits – What real benefit does your product provide
- Target market – Knowing who your actual buyers are, enables you to create demand, the driving force behind economic growth
- Competition – Your competitors are not just similar products or brands but also anything else your customer could do to meet the need you can fulfill.
6. Identifying market trends
By investing in BI, you boost your ability to recognize market trends. Market trends are examined to make predictions.
You will be tuned up to identify trends related to consumer behavior, employment, technological advancements, new product development, competition, government policies, and other factors that impact the market.
7. Spotting business problems that need to be addressed
You can use BI to gain overwhelming insights into the problems your brand needs to promptly address and the necessary steps to take in addressing them. The steps are:
- Take the time to define the problem clearly
- Pursue alternate paths on “facts of life” and opportunities
- Challenge the definition from all angles
- Succinctly question the cause of the problem
- Identify multiple possible solutions
- Prioritize potential solutions
- Make a decision
- Assign responsibility
- Set a measure for the solution
Conclusion
For you to reap all the benefits of an effective BI system and strategy for your brand, you need to invest in skilled BI personnel as well as training, and software designed for analytical efficiency and accessibility. You should ensure that the system and strategy you choose can analyze not only the content but also the context of data as well.
