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Running an enterprise is no small feat and requires a lot of sophisticated technology and knowledge to achieve and maintain. Enterprise business intelligence (BI) systems are designed for large-scale corporations looking for data-driven insights. By collecting and analyzing data, enterprise BI tools aid companies in increasing automation, extracting meaningful insights, and ultimately improving business performance. In this article, we’ll discuss what enterprise business intelligence is, explore benefits and challenges, and tackle the complex issues of implementation.
Enterprise business intelligence platforms are solutions designed to offer meaningful insights into the business. Using data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning algorithms, such systems help corporations rely on data when making important business decisions. By gaining access to forecasting abilities, companies can cut costs and enhance operational efficiency. Usually, we can identify two main types of enterprise BI solutions:
A strategic business intelligence tool focuses on big-picture analysis and helps organizations generate reports regarding strategic issues. These platforms collect and optimize data, identify trends and patterns, and facilitate solutions to business weaknesses. For example, strategic enterprise business intelligence platforms can aid you in discovering your valuable customers, fastest-growing regions, optimal pricing, and much more.
An operational business intelligence solution is built to handle operational decisions, supporting employees with their everyday tasks. While strategic enterprise BI tools focus on reports, graphs, and charts, operational systems are meant to deal with mundane daily occurrences that distract workers from their duties. For instance, these systems can help you generate a new invoice or receipt, update a financial statement, or send out promotions through marketing mailing lists.
Although customizable to a specific company’s infrastructure, the core elements of an enterprise business intelligence software solution remain the same. In this part, we’ll dive into four main components of every enterprise BI system.
First and foremost, to leverage the sophisticated abilities of big data analytics, companies need to consolidate their data from different sources. An enterprise business intelligence solution has the capability to collect information from multiple data sources, including CRM tools, financial systems, supply chain management platforms, and relevant external data.
The collected data is then stored in various locations, depending on its nature. While unstructured raw data is mostly stored in data lakes, processed datasets are later moved to a data warehouse. It’s important to preserve your datasets in an organized manner to ensure the utmost results and security.
The meat of the operations, data analysis helps organizations leverage their stored historical data as well as real-time updates to identify patterns and correlations to unlock valuable insights. From predictive analytics to see into the future to descriptive analysis to evaluate the past, organizations can majorly improve their decision making.
After the analysis, companies can choose a way to present their findings in the most meaningful and digestible way. Tools like dashboards, graphs, charts, and even alerts allow organizations to gain a clear understanding of the results and turn them into actionable insights.
Large-scale corporations often suffer from the lack of enterprise automation due to the increased volume of tasks, complexity of operations, and high costs. Having the ability to swiftly look into the behind-the-scenes empowers companies to make smarter business decisions. Additionally, the ingrained data visualization features allow even non-tech employees to access information in a comprehensible way. The enhanced transparency and accessibility of previously complex data insights enable businesses to remain flexible and competitive.
Another crucial benefit of enterprise business intelligence comes from enhancing productivity across the organization. By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining business operations, companies enable their employees to devote their time to complex analytical activities. While routine tasks kill productivity and ambition, critical problem-solving situations give people motivation.
On top of that, an enterprise business intelligence platform can help companies understand their customers better. By utilizing historical data, you can identify trends in customer behavior and pinpoint when they’re likely to make a purchase, which products they are interested in, and where their dissatisfaction lies. These findings can not only enhance customer experience and boost brand loyalty but also increase sales and consequently generate higher revenue.
Let’s break down the core functionality of enterprise business intelligence solutions and explore how they can improve your business operations.
Among the most important and valuable features of an enterprise BI software tool are diverse reporting mechanisms. From interactive dashboards displaying real-time insights to bar graphs and tables representing data in numerous ways, you can read the results of your analytics in many ways. The interactivity allows business users to drill into datasets, look deeper into a certain issue, or have a big-picture overview in a couple of clicks.
Additionally, this advanced reporting feature enables users to set up alerts and notifications to get informed whenever a certain scenario plays out. This function empowers decision-makers to stay quick on their feet and avoid small problems from unraveling into serious matters.
Finally, sophisticated reporting tools provide ranking features, allowing users to generate lists with the best or worst aspects of the business process, product, or other factor. For instance, you can swiftly rank up your worst-performing products to identify market trends and adjust your strategy.
Enterprise business intelligence platforms are also excellent at optimizing data management and creating a traceable overview of each dataset. From gathering data from different sources and consolidating, storing, processing, and analyzing it to extracting meaningful insights, an enterprise software solution will empower you to organize your datasets.
AI-powered systems can expand your analytical capabilities to provide personalized suggestions, identify market trends, and make accurate predictions. For instance, you can perform the what-if analysis to evaluate the potential outcomes of a certain decision and how it may affect business performance. Before unrolling a new product or feature, you can run the scenario through the system to see how it would impact different areas of your business.
Even though an enterprise business intelligence solution can be run on-premises, most modern BI tools are based in the cloud. Aside from offering cost savings and security, cloud solutions are accessible from across devices and locations, making it a more flexible alternative and an important BI trend. Especially if you work with independent contractors or third-party companies, allowing them remote access to relevant data can be crucial for a successful collaboration.
Even a well-organized database can be challenging to search through without a built-in search engine. Using natural language processing techniques, users can search internal data storage to find the desired file or information. This feature breaks the barriers for non-tech employees by removing the necessity for complex SQL knowledge. Such self-service analytics tools empower workers to act autonomously and extract relevant information without going through the IT department.
Any business that handles customer data, particularly sensitive financial or personal information, requires robust security guardrails. Enterprise business intelligence systems facilitate a number of data governance and security features to protect your data. From permission control and audits to encryption and multi-factor authentication, modern enterprise BI platforms can bolster your IT posture.
Moreover, these tools provide you with data and resources to ensure compliance with industry-standard privacy laws like GDPR and HIPAA. They help you make sure your data collection is consensual and authorized and your storage solutions are well protected.
A reliable enterprise BI solution can also be tailored to accommodate your company’s unique issues and concerns. Such enterprise business intelligence tools provide a wide range of customizable dashboards, reports, and visualizations, allowing you to tweak and alter the display. You can investigate certain KPIs in isolation as well as assess a more complex breakdown of your performance metrics, allowing you to see the problem from different angles.
Finally, the ability to consolidate data and insights in one cloud-based location allows for better collaboration within and across teams. These enterprise business intelligence tools help employees exchange notes and feedback, work together on complex issues, and share their findings with third-party platforms like Slack.
In the abundance of enterprise BI platforms available in the market, choosing the right tools can be a challenge, especially for a non-tech executive. In this section, we’ll go over the best practices for selecting the most suitable system for your organization.
Consider business requirements: Before locking in a specific enterprise business intelligence platform, consider your existing data structure and needs. The tool of your choice should be able to meet your technical and business requirements and align with your overall goals.
Opt for self-service enterprise BI platform: Self-service BI tools are a solution that can be used by non-tech employees and doesn’t require in-depth technical prowess. An intuitive interface paired with interactive and customizable dashboards and other reporting features unlocks complex data analysis capabilities even for non-tech-savvy personnel. Empowering your workers to make autonomous data-driven decisions without the involvement of IT specialists will boost productivity across the organization.
Implement secure data management from day one:Enterprise BI software handles an immense volume of business data, making it vulnerable to attacks and mistakes. Ensure your adherence to proper data integration policies and laws, execute regular audits, and instill rules for clear and thorough documentation. Furthermore, pay attention to data quality, as working with subpar datasets can result in counterproductive outcomes.
Take the costs into account: Although large-scale businesses usually have more disposable resources to invest in advanced analytics, it’s imperative to consider the expenses when making a decision. Different enterprise business intelligence tools have various pricing models that may or may not suit your specific needs and finances. Calculate the costs of setup, monthly expenses, and the potential cost increase when scaled up.
Prioritize advanced visualization features: The ability to visualize data in different forms and methods is a large part of what makes enterprise business intelligence solutions so valuable. When choosing the right tool, make sure it offers advanced data visualization capabilities which allow even non-tech staff to derive meaningful insights.
Pay attention to scalability: Your business is bound to go through various phases of growth or stagnation, prompting a highly scalable enterprise BI platform. Whether you’re adding new data storage solutions like an operational data store or increasing the number of business users, your system should be able to handle the change without downtime or other complications.
Collaborate with a reputable agency: If you can discern that your company cannot handle the implementation of a BI platform, consider partnering up with a seasoned agency. Alternatively, request assistance from the vendor as some companies provide implementation support for their new clients.
Before we move on to the guide to BI implementation, let’s go over the common pitfalls that arise in the process of adoption. The most common challenge is associated with data integration. Dealing with poorly organized, low-quality data will not provide you with meaningful results. On the contrary, it will skew your understanding of business processes and make things worse.
Another ubiquitous challenge is the complexity of such systems. To maximize the outcomes of enterprise BI implementation, educate your staff on how to operate with these tools and use business intelligence to their advantage. Additionally, the high upfront investment can be intimidating and defer corporations from pursuing enterprise business intelligence implementation.
Finally, data security is at the top of stakeholders’ minds when it comes to any new technology. Especially for sensitive data, organizations are highly concerned about the safety of their assets.
Finally, let’s explore the enterprise BI adoption process to ensure a smooth transition.
Before you can be helped, you need to identify your issues and weaknesses. The first step involves a thorough analysis of your current infrastructure and business operations to pinpoint what exactly you need. Investigate your business objectives, available resources, and technological equipment to find where you’re lacking.
While modern enterprise business intelligence tools can provide you with a myriad of KPIs and metrics, you need to choose a few to measure the implementation’s success. Tracking all of them at the same time is virtually impossible and also unnecessary. Separate your vital metrics into categories to allow each department to keep track of their important KPIs. For example, an HR department should monitor cost per hire while marketing executives are in charge of conversion rates.
Apart from the technical team comprising developers, machine learning experts, data scientists, and database specialists, assign representatives from each department. Since you’re creating a self-service enterprise BI platform, your non-tech employees should be able to use it on their own, making their contributions invaluable for the implementation process.
If you lack in-house expertise in business intelligence, consider partnering up with a third-party agency that will help you with each step. From developing a strategy and gathering requirements to the adoption and ongoing support, a reputable IT company can help you avoid common pitfalls and maximize the benefits of the BI platform.
Such organizations can also help you select the best system for your needs from numerous business intelligence examples like Microsoft Power BI or Tableau. If needed, they can also help you develop a custom enterprise BI solution that solves your unique needs.
In the next step, your in-house data scientists or outsourcing partner should make sure your data is properly organized and synchronized to prevent data silos. Additionally, they should ensure that your data is of high quality, accurate, and complete. Without this phase, the results of data analytics will be skewed or misleading, rendering the whole implementation void.
Once all the steps are complete, deploy your business intelligence service and run tests to ensure high levels of performance and functionality. Additionally, monitor the KPIs and collect feedback from business users to gradually improve the usability and experience. Later, you can expand your usage to other metrics to enhance other aspects of your business.
While enterprise business intelligence implementation can be a game changer for any company, completing the transition without expert help can be quite difficult. If you’re interested in the technology, consider reaching out to NIX. We’re a team of seasoned IT specialists helping companies through the complexities of digital transformation. Using our decades-long experience and in-depth technical prowess, we’ll guide you through enterprise BI adoption and help you leverage enterprise business intelligence functionality to the fullest.
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