Organizations of all sizes have been using Business Intelligence (BI) solutions to analyze their business performance and enable key decision makers to make better decisions. A critical piece of any BI solution is the tool(s) being deployed.
While the tools are continually evolving, consideration must be given to the following five categories:
- Databases;
- Extraction transformation and load (ETL) tools;
- Data quality tools;
- Reporting tools; and
- Statistical analysis tools.
Many BI solutions address more than one category. Additionally, transitioning an organization to a real-time, on-demand business intelligence solution involves several components including data management, warehousing, processing and integration solutions, along with business performance management, big data analytics and visualization tools.
The Benefits of BI Analytics
BI and analytics allow organizations to gain competitive advantage, reduce operational risk and cost, and identify and fine-tune business strategies.
More specifically, well-designed BI and analytics systems offer C-suite executives the opportunity to gain a more complete view of the business operation, often with near-real-time updates and alerts and facilitates business process analysis and redesign as well as performance management and agile marketing. Moreover, BI and analytics can be utilized to incorporate feedback from internal end users and external customers to enhance areas such as help desk operations and customer experience management.
The primary users of BI analytics tools tend to be upper management — such as CFOs and chief marketing officers — as well as business analysts and other individuals on their team in the marketing and finance departments. For the CFO, reporting helps to keep operations running, while analytics permits the CFO to provide the CEO with insights that demonstrate how business strategies are affecting the quarterly results (and why) and how the organization compares to competitors.
BI Analytics Software Trends
Determining whether your organization needs a BI analytics tool, and then deciding which tool best meets your needs, is often a major strategic decision. However, careful assessment and comparison of vendor products, their fit with your needs and their capacity for supporting new technologies in the future should help to make your decision easier. To help you determine your needs, it’s a good idea to take a closer look at the many features BI analytics tools offer, as well as typical use cases for which these tools are optimized.
The Litcom Approach
Data Visualization technologies empower your business users with an intuitive way to interact, search, realize trends, and discover stories in their data. Data Visualization and Discovery is pushing the borders and producing an information rich environment for users to study their data in a more self-service way.
Litcom’s Data Visualization service allow you to turn a vast array of data into valuable information that drives decision-making in a corporation. Our solutions ensure that you are able to look at your data in a way that you could not before.
Litcom helps you uncover the trends in your business data that were not obvious in the past – and we help you learn to build your own dashboards and models so you stay ahead of your competition.
Contact us to find out more about how data visualization can serve your visual communication objectives.