Why Traditional Business Intelligence Is No Longer Beneficial For Enterprises

Whether you're looking to grow sales, new product innovation, optimize marketing budget, reduce operating costs, or become an industry game changer, Business Intelligence (BI) can help you achieve your business strategic goals most effectively. BI Tools can solve complex data and analytics business challenges by enabling you to:

• Analyze data from disparate systems
• Make data-driven decisions
• Unlock new markets trends and opportunities
• Align Business Strategies

Besides these challenges, BI Tools can also help you in investigating each problem in-depth and discover the hidden gap. This application can provide proven benefits to all scales of companies across industries.

Traditional BI vs. Self-Service BI

The critical need for business analysis in-depth derived the evolution of traditional BI and Self-service BI. However, owning and operating traditional BI was more of a costly affair and feasible for resource-rich businesses solely. New technology innovations reinvented BI tools and improved them to expand the capabilities for governance and scalability for all kinds of users. Let’s understand the key facts of both approaches:

Traditional BI

• Requires a complex IT environment, space for data warehousing, and constant support from data-analyst experts
• Access is restricted to IT personnel and data experts. Market opportunities might remain trapped inside a week- or month-long cycle of queries and reports.
• Difficult task to extract insights out of data and create analytical reports for separate business functions
• Focus on answering questions about what happened in the past or is happening right now
• Need to structure the data before it can be analysed

Self-Service BI

• Fast to deploy and use
• Non-IT users can do data analysis, and generate reports and insights in real-time. They can also unlock trends and correlations by modelling data on-the-fly
• Allows users to slice and dice data to extract insights as per their need
• In addition to historical reporting, provides predictive analysis about future trends
• Harness data in various formats from multiple sources

The Shift Toward Self-Service BI

While the traditional approach to BI has served large companies well in the past, it's time to extend analysis capabilities beyond and embrace the concept of advanced intelligence for small to medium sized enterprises. Such a transition is important due to digital transformation in the business landscape and competitiveness today. As a result, all scales of enterprises are derived to become data-driven throughout every aspect of the organization across industries. It fosters agile decision-making which is essential for addressing strategic business goals in an uncertain business environment. In addition to these reasons, there are many others contribute to this shift toward Self-Service BI:

Dynamic Dashboards

To monitor your business and see all of your most important metrics at a glance the best way is new-age BI Dashboards. The visualizations on a dashboard are based on one underlying dataset and report or many. A dashboard combines both on-premises and cloud data, giving consolidated information no matter where the data stores. Hence, a dashboard isn't just a dynamic picture. It's highly interactive for users and its tiles are updated as the underlying data changes.

Data-Driven Decisions

In today’s digital-age business world, organizations need to forge a data-driven culture to dive into and analyze the treasure of data generated from multiple sources like websites, social media, customers’ feedback etc. In-depth data analytics can help companies derive innovations in their offerings and capitalize on rising opportunities in the market. Easy to install and use, Self-Service BI Tool has helped many organizations in making the successful leap to evolve their data and analytics initiatives in a new direction.

Agile Approach

The agile approach of the business depends on quick decisions to arrive at the desired outcome. Quick decision, in turn, relies on data collection and testing, both of which are easy to done through advanced data analytics tools. Furthermore, since Self-Service BI gives the entire organization access to the same data, it facilitates more efficient unifying teamwork. For instance, the entire marketing team having access to insights can optimize campaigns in real-time. Or the entire development team getting reports on product usage can make improvements accordingly.

Stakeholder Engagement

The unparalleled advantage of new-age BI tools is that they provide true stakeholder engagement in long-term planning, budgeting, and forecasting. For example, if a manager has a clear understanding between an input (certain indices, plans for sales volumes, etc.) and an output, it allows for clear and effective conversations within the department.

With Self-service BI tools, like Power BI, questions that arise in meetings can be addressed and answered immediately without going back to the analysts to prepare another report and postpone the discussion until the next time. Furthermore, access to BI application via mobile devices and tablets also boosts stakeholder involvement – making data analysis easily accessible wherever you go.

Accurate Reporting

The repetitive and time-consuming manual task of copying and pasting numbers is error-prone and can undermine trust in your financial data. Fortunately, all these tasks can be automated by Business Intelligence. Utilizing BI software for direct data access and report automation saves you a lot of time and money, and most importantly, increases accuracy in the data. Besides, BI brings more credibility to data by improving poor data quality. Proper and accurate analysis is only possible when data is of good quality. Simply gathering information is not enough today. The core component of BI systems is the ETL process which ensures good quality of data in the warehouse through standardization and eliminating duplicate figures.

The above discussion indicates that an organization should consider moving beyond traditional Business Intelligence. If you are planning for initiating your BI Journey and looking for a BI Services partner then Eastern Software Solutions is the right destination for you. We provide the most trusted secure and cost-effective BI solutions to all companies across industries and locations.