As you may know, business intelligence (or BI) is a broad term for the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data about your business – all with the goal of understanding it better and making data-driven decisions to unlock its full potential. As such, BI is a blanket term covering a variety of tools and techniques.
Business intelligence can be used to predict or forecast future business performance, identify competitive advantage, review the current state of the business in real time, and formulate strategy based on analysis of current performance and future challenges.
What can you do with your data?
As mentioned, BI offers a number of techniques for making the most of the data you have; including
- Data mining – the analysis of large amounts of information to identify patterns or trends.
- Performance benchmarking – using data to compare your performance with the competition to answer questions such as where do you stand in the market, where can you improve, and how?
- Business process analysis – pretty much as it sounds, looking at the processes your business runs on from a strictly factual perspective, allowing for data-based improvements.
- Descriptive analysis – summarising your business’s quantitative statistics with a focus on specific elements; analysis of the business ‘piece by piece’.
Apply business intelligence and be better
Unsurprisingly, the more information or data you can factor in to your decisions, the better and more timely those decisions will be. More specific benefits include:
- Better efficiency and productivity – Not only can you make better business decisions with BI, the right software tools can automate much of the data gathering, cleaning and analysis.
- Better customer service – Your data can potentially give you insights into customer segments and profiles, their wants and needs for your products/services, current trends, feeding into your marketing strategy and allowing you to improve the customer experience.
- Better competitiveness – Improved understanding of your own performance and that of the competition allows you to be quicker and more agile in your decision-making; less likely to be left behind in the market.
- Better strategic planning – Deeper analysis and understanding of the past combined with market insights leads to improved decisions for the future.
- Better accessibility – BI tools don’t just crunch the numbers, they allow you to present information in the form of more-easily-understood reports, tables, graphs and other visuals.
So, investing in business intelligence can improve business performance, streamline processes, boost marketing returns, and result in better understanding of both the market in general and your own client base. But where to start?
One low-cost way of dipping a toe in the BI waters is Microsoft’s free Power BI package which, in Microsoft’s own words, allows you “connect to, transform, and visualize …multiple different sources of data, and combine them (often called modeling) into a data model.”
With that in mind, we’re offering a free “Introduction to Power BI” webinar on 15th November 2024. This 45-minute event will look at using Power BI to import and clean data, the creation of data-based visuals, and how to build an interactive data analysis dashboard for your business. Sign up here. Or give us a call on 01582 463463 – we’re here to help.
