Many businesses collect large volumes of data, flowing in from their ERP software, eCommerce platforms, supply chains, and a range of other sources. To use this data to make data-driven decisions, a business requires a modern business intelligence (BI) system.
Business intelligence (BI) uses software and services to convert data into actionable insights to help businesses make more data-driven decisions. It is used to convert raw data into meaningful information and allows businesses to present the data in easy-to-understand formats and deliver data in a timely fashion to all stakeholders. Most often, businesses use BI consulting to implement this software and services in data centers for more effective results.
There are many different tools used in business intelligence. Some include:
BI dashboards
Dashboards use charts, graphs and tables to track pre-defined KPIs and other essential business metrics – and provide an at-a-glance overview of performance.
BI reporting
BI reporting uses summaries and other visual elements like charts and graphs to show users’ trends over time, relationships between variables and more.
Querying
Querying BI tools enable users to ask questions and get valuable answers through intuitive interfaces.
Data visualization
Data visualization through charts, graphs, maps and other formats that bring data to life, is used throughout a BI system, including in reports and dashboards.
Let’s look at the most important BI tool features:
Source:Mobilunity
Here are some ways BI can be used in different business areas:
Human Resources
BI can be used to monitor a variety of metrics such as time, productivity rates and employee turnover. This allows them to make better hiring decisions, optimize staff schedules and more.
Marketing
Businesses can use business intelligence to track campaign results and tailor future promotions to make them even more effective.
Finance
BI allows businesses to consolidate financial data and manage margins, cash flows, expenses and more.
How BI Can Help Data Center Leaders Make Smarter Decisions and Avoid Mistakes
BI empowers data center leaders to process large amounts of data obtained from different sources to make highly informed decisions while mitigating risks. Let’s look at how this is done:
Getting insights about resource usage
Applying BI to the data center can help show data center leaders what’s happening in a data center and link activities to the respected resource usage. If the leader realizes a certain activity uses more resources than required, he or she can take a deeper look deeper into the matter to identify any issues.
Improving performance while mitigating risks
Business intelligence can enable leaders to perform effectively by identifying risks such as schedules, budget and data accuracy issues, using systematic algorithms and approaches. With the right BI applications and tools, projects can remain on schedule and on budget.
Establishing benchmarking
Benchmarking is an estimable data analysis tool businesses can apply to assess performance, productivity and revenue in comparison with competitive brands. BI can simplify it by always providing data center leaders with real-time information in efficient and effective reports.
Better communication
BI tools ensure data center leaders can keep everyone up to date about data at the same time. It offers them a centralized data warehouse with role-based access and visualizations to tell better stories with higher quality data.
More accurate reporting
BI allows leaders to collect and process real-time data. With this, businesses can benefit from real-time analytics and organize the constantly updating info into more accurate reports.
Making more informed decisions
Business intelligence helps leaders to assess business performance more precisely and gain a better understanding of internal organization processes. It enables them to access employee productivity information and the overall success of certain departments. This gives them a clear picture of what is working and what is not.
The Role of BI Consulting
Business intelligence IT consulting is used to improve a business’ internal processes through effective data analysis. The primary duties of a business intelligence consultant include monitoring data storage, preparing data analysis reports, documenting work processes, reviewing and validating data and monitoring analysis metrics. BI consulting also brings the following elements to a business:
Access to advanced analytics
One of the primary goals of business intelligence consulting is to present critical data in an easy-to-understand way, enabling businesses to clearly understand their customers’ needs. As a result, they can tune their offerings accordingly and deliver better services.
Enhancing marketing activities
BI consulting allows businesses to take a closer look at multidimensional retail data to forecast customer needs and define marketing efforts to meet the demand.
Reducing risks
Many business intelligence efforts fail due to risks such as poor data quality, lack of BI expertise and not accommodating reporting needs. These challenges could lead to years of lost investments and opportunities. Professional BI consulting can address these challenges, and allow businesses to evolve and reach new levels of development.
Boosting back-end operations
A BI consultant can analyze data to improve a business’ internal processes, such as staffing, order management, scheduling, inventory control and supply chain supervision.
Robust data security
BI consulting offers granular control over data and the accessibility of reports. It provides the opportunity to control access to the software by establishing the filters’ roles. As a result, data is secured and only those who are permitted have access to it.
Monitoring the competition
A business intelligence analyst can offer competitive analysis that allows businesses to continuously improve their performance, while also delivering practical insights on how to outperform competitors.
Other responsibilities of a BI consultant may include:
Source:Mobilunity
The Bottom Line
Using the right approach to BI in your data center can help your business gain a competitive advantage by reducing the time and effort needed to collect, integrate, share, review and react to new data. The better your business is at processing data, the more benefits it can gain from business intelligence.
Choosing to work with a BI consulting company or a remote BI consultant is a strategic decision. With this partnership, you can overcome any challenges, while having the opportunity to understand the market and your consumers better.