It’s not some secret that data is a huge benefit to enterprises. Despite knowing this, the majority of data collected by businesses goes unused. Companies can address this issue is by adopting business intelligence tools to wring more value from data. Below are a few ways adopting new BI tools can change the way your business makes decisions.
How Is Modern BI Changing Things for Businesses?
Before diving into the specifics of how BI can elevate your organization, it’s important to understand how modern tools are driving change. In the past, BI meant employees would have to send off requests to analysts, who then created the actual reports based on those queries. This process typically took days, if not weeks, and often required follow-up to get full answers.
Modern BI takes that waiting out of the process because it’s accessible to regular employees without a background in data. Better user design, dashboards, and functionality all contribute to higher adoption rates. And employees can keep asking questions, drilling down to deeply understand the results they’re seeing rather than relying on static reports.
Spot Emerging Trends
Data can tell a story. But you’re not going to get that tale unless you read it. Getting a grasp on emerging trends can keep an organization ahead of the competition. With the old way of doing business, you needed to rely on intuition in order to make future-based decisions. Many executives are still doing this despite the negative impacts it can have on performance.
Modern business intelligence affords users the ability to make smarter decisions by being able to get a better grasp on the future. Machine learning and artificial intelligence are contributing to these vastly improved capabilities of BI today.
Get Answers Faster
Faster turnaround is one of the biggest benefits that comes along with deploying modern BI tools and encouraging employee adoption of them. As already mentioned, new BI allows a greater number of employees to effectively get data insights. User-friendly embedded dashboards and other features enable people in all departments to stay abreast of ad hoc business intelligence on their own.
ThoughtSpot is one example of a BI platform that prioritizes data accessibility and adoptability for everyone. Its relational search feature is a prime example of data democratization in action. It allows users to make BI queries in the same way it would be done when using a search engine. This produces immediate, actionable insights without needing to loop in a data analyst each time.
Democratize Data Insights
So, what is data democratization, exactly? It’s a way of removing restrictions on data access within an organization. This can lead to quicker turnaround times and a broader array of insights available to those who need them.
Essentially, when employees can use data to their advantage, they’re going to take novel approaches and ask more questions. It changes the very nature of what’s possible in their daily workflows. Fewer discoveries will slip through the cracks, as tends to happen when employees know it’s a hassle to work with data. Instead, people will go about their roles knowing they can ask questions and get answers in seconds, then use those answers to drive sound decision-making.
Improve Bottom Line and Business Functionality
Ultimately, business decisions involving adopting new technology need to provide ROI. While all business intelligence tools aim to do this, modern BI really delivers what it takes to improve the bottom line. All the aforementioned aspects to modern BI help it maximize ROI.
Whether your org deals in supply chains, telecommunications, healthcare, ecommerce or anything in between — when employees adopt modern BI tools, they’re able to dive into data and use their findings to make better decisions.
