Question 1

What is Business Intelligence Software?

Accepted Answer

Implementing analytics software has been a major initiative for companies undergoing digital transformation, and the main subsection of analytics tools deployed in companies are business intelligence (BI) tools. These BI tools help to provide visibility into a company’s data. By being able to visualize and understand business data, employees can make more informed decisions and impact the company in a positive way. With the amount of data accessible to businesses today, it is a near necessity that they implement some type of BI software to better understand and act on that data. 
 Key Benefits of Business Intelligence Software 
 
Easily visualize and understand company data
Connect all company data sources into a single platform to make cross-department connections
Encourage data-driven decision making for business optimization
Discover new insights that can enhance the bottom line

Question 2

Why Use Business Intelligence Software?

Accepted Answer

In today’s big data world, every company is sitting on an enormous amount of data. Inside lies insights that can make or break company processes and performance. The question should not be why use business intelligence software, but why not use business intelligence software? There are seemingly infinite insights a business can pull from their data, but here are three important reasons to use business intelligence software. 
 Data-Driven Decision-Making — A key component to digital transformation is to become a data-driven organization. By using data to drive every decision the business makes, the company can optimize and achieve its fullest potential. This concept should be instilled within every employee in the company, not just a few leadership members who make high-level decisions. Instead, companies should be leveraging analytics and business intelligence tools to understand all aspects of the business, including hiring forecasts, which marketing campaign should be used to target certain demographics, which sales prospects to target first, supply chain optimization, and many others. Each of these business aspects and the decisions made around them should first be vetted by using data and business intelligence software. Every manager and leader should be asking what data was used to determine each decision. 
 Measure and Understand Company Performance — Another main reason that businesses adopt business intelligence tools is for tracking and measurement of company goals. Data visualization tools are frequently used to track company key performance indicators in real time. Business intelligence platforms and self-service business intelligence software can be used to then determine why the business is either exceeding or falling short of those important company metrics. By developing a keen understanding of why the business is performing the way it is, adjustment and pivots can be made quickly and easily. So if a team is falling short of a goal, they can make up for it and get back on track. It is one thing to simply know where your sales numbers are or how your web traffic is performing, but it is another to dig into the reasons behind it and adapt based on what is successful and what is not. 
 Discover New Actionable Insights — BI tools combine data from a variety of sources, including accounting and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, CRMs, marketing automation tools, and others. Data analysts can use this integrated data to find correlations between different departments and the actions they are taking to discover previously hidden insights. It’s possible that certain sales tactics are impacting the numbers for one specific product differently than they are for another. Analysts can discover this by comparing the list of closed accounts from their company CRM with products shipped in their ERP system. Because teams are generally siloed and using disparate software, these insights have traditionally been much more difficult to discover. However, by using business intelligence software properly, companies are at an advantage they never had in the past.

Question 3

What are the Different Kinds of Business Intelligence Software?

Accepted Answer

There are a number of different types of business intelligence (BI) solutions that have overlapping functionality but ultimately cater to a different user or provide unique services. 
 Business Intelligence Platforms — The most common type of BI tools are business intelligence platforms. BI platforms are comprehensive analytics tools that are used by data analysts and scientists. They often require a certain level of coding or data preparation knowledge. These solutions connect to databases, data warehouses, or big data distributions and offer analysts the ability to tinker with data to discover insights. Some BI platforms offer advanced analytics features, such as predictive analytics, big data analytics, and the ability to ingest unstructured data. Additionally, BI platforms may offer self-service functionality so that basic business users can use the tool, but at the core they are to be used by data and IT teams. 
 Self-Service Business Intelligence Software — For companies interested in promoting a data-driven culture, self-service business intelligence software is critical. Self-service business intelligence tools do not require coding knowledge, so business end users can take advantage of them. These solutions often provide drag-and-drop functionality for building dashboards, prebuilt templates for querying data, and maybe even natural language querying for data discovery. Similarly to BI platforms, these tools are used to build interactive dashboards for discovering actionable insights. This allows users like sales representatives, human resource managers, marketers, and other non-data team members to make data-driven decisions. This saves time for the user, administrator, and data team. 
 Embedded Business Intelligence Software — Some software may offer the ability to embed analytics functionality inside of other business applications. Often, these are the same vendors that offer BI platforms and self-service business intelligence software. They sell their proprietary business intelligence solutions by allowing developers to embed the technology inside other applications. Businesses may choose an embedded business intelligence product to promote user adoption. By placing the analytics inside regularly used software, companies can help to ensure employees are taking advantage of available data. These solutions provide self-service functionality so that average business end users can take advantage of data for improved decision making. 
 Data Visualization Software — If a business is interested in simply tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and other important metrics, they may opt to use a data visualization software. These products allow users to build dashboards to track company goals and metrics in real time. However, they do not allow users to drill down into the data to discover deeper insights. By understanding where a business or team sits with certain company goals and KPIs, they can make efforts in specific areas to achieve said goals. These solutions allow for multiple KPI dashboards, so each team can set up visualizations for their own goals. These tools can consume data from a variety of sources, just like all other business intelligence tools, such as databases and business applications. 
 Location Intelligence Software — Often called spatial intelligence, location intelligence software is a subset of business analytics that provides insights based on map and spatial data. These tools help users determine relationships between the physical location of objects. In the same way a user can find patterns in financial or sales data with a BI platform, data analysts can use location intelligence tools to determine the ideal spot to open their next restaurant or place their next warehouse. These tools are often used separately from a business intelligence tool or even integrate with existing analytics tools.

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