Why the Future of Analytics is Enterprise Business Intelligence

What is Enterprise Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of collecting, storing, analyzing, and exploring data to gain insights into business performance. Enterprise BI tools help organizations increase productivity and efficiency by analyzing the large amounts of data flowing into the business. An enterprise BI tool can be used to create strategies and help solve current issues an organization faces and help leaders make data-driven decisions.

Key Components of Enterprise Business Intelligence

With so many enterprise BI options available, choosing one can be complicated and intimidating. As your organization begins to collect and analyze more data, you should look for the right capabilities such as:

Data Governance

Having governance and centralized data is essential for a successful BI platform. Accessing data from one point ensures security, reliability, and consistency, ultimately providing more accurate reports and analyses.

Data Sources

Modern enterprise BI tools should connect to a cloud data warehouse or a data lake, with this connection organizations can access all of their data from one single point. Having a centralized data source will allow your business to save time and resources when exploring their data.

Collaboration

Collaboration is critical to have for any data-driven business wanting to be efficient. With larger organizations, you need an enterprise BI solution that works seamlessly between departments and users. Users should be able to effortlessly publish, share, and edit data/reports without risk.

Self-Serving

The right enterprise BI solution should be fully self-serving. Users should be able to answer their questions without the help of a technical user or data team. Many BI tools available right now are not user-friendly and often require SQL knowledge to gain any insights from the data.

Data Visualization

An effective enterprise BI solution should let users easily turn analyses into collaborative interactive visualizations and dashboards. Users also need to be able to explore the underlying, granular data for further analysis.

Benefits of Enterprise Business Intelligence

BI software can elevate your business by giving you full visibility of your day-to-day operations across your entire organization. Decision-makers can explore the data they need, empowering them to make informed decisions. Here are 5 ways businesses can benefit from enterprise BI.

Faster Analysis

Enterprise BI platforms need to be able to handle heavy data processing in the cloud. BI tools pull data from multiple sources into the data warehouse allowing users to easily and quickly play with the data to create custom reports and dashboards. No longer do business users need to wait for data teams or engineers to answer questions.

Predictive Analytics

Companies of all sizes are using predictive analytics to identify new opportunities, reduce risk, and make data-driven decisions. Predictive analysis lets you see likely outcomes that await you if you take a given path. Understanding probable outcomes and having the ability to prepare for them is important in today’s uncertain world.

Data-Driven Decisions

Having live accurate data and faster reporting capabilities provides for better business decisions. Allowing users to answer questions with confidence and creating strategies backed by the data. Making data-driven business decisions will provide a significant competitive edge.

Increased Competitive Advantage

Understanding the market and how your business is performing can be key to building a competitive advantage. Enterprise BI solutions allow businesses to track new trends and changes in customer behavior

Improved Customer Experience

Business intelligence can impact customer satisfaction. A BI tool should equip customers to have complete control of their data. From creating custom visualizations to diving deep into the underlying data to draw insights and make data-driven decisions.

Challenges to Implementing Enterprise Business Intelligence

In order to reap the full benefits of enterprise BI software, organizations need a BI strategy in place. Knowing what problems you face and how a BI solution will solve them is key when deciding to invest time and resources.

Adopting enterprise BI software can be expensive

BI software can have large upfront costs. With some BI solutions organizations also need to consider the cost of implementation, scaling, and training. However, with cloud-based BI solutions becoming the standard, the cost to adopt and implement has come down.

Complex reporting

Many BI tools claim to be self-serving and easy to use but the reality is much different. Most BI tools require training for users or even basic or advanced knowledge of a coding language such as SQL. Often times data teams will have to sacrifice time to create reports and dashboards for business teams — this can lead to inefficient use of time and frustration.

Infrastructure

For most companies, data has been handled by IT departments which leads to the data being siloed. These silos limit collaboration between users, departments, and stakeholders and require extra steps to be taken when interpreting the data. Legacy BI tools are slow and can put data at risk since the infrastructure they are built on tends to be outdated and requires technical users to manage.

Modern cloud-based BI solutions allow data to be easily accessed by users across the organization. Since the data is stored in the cloud data warehouse, it can only be accessed from a single point making the data more secure and less likely to be lost.

How to Devise and Implement a BI Strategy

Organizations should implement a BI strategy that aligns with their business goals and vision. A BI tool can democratize data across an organization so that users can drive informed decisions based on data. Having a BI deployment strategy ready is crucial before jumping on a solution.

Understand your current data infrastructure

It's critical to make sure that the BI tool your organization is purchasing plugs into your infrastructure and integrates well across the other tools you use. If you don't have the infrastructure to support your BI tool, you will have issues with collaboration, scaling, and face limitations.

With modern BI you can analyze data from multiple sources because you will have a cloud data warehouse where all of your data is centralized. This will make collaboration easy and keep data secure.

Understand the problem you’re trying to solve

Before choosing and implementing a BI solution, it is important to first understand what issues your business is facing and what it would take to solve them. Because there are multiple BI solutions available, it can be overwhelming to pick one. Once you have identified a BI tool that best fits your data stack, it’s time to implement it.

Choose a BI platform

When choosing a BI solution organizations should look to empower their business users to answer their own questions as much as possible. Self-service BI tools have emerged on top as modern cloud analytics have exploded due to them being affordable, efficient, and powerful. With a self-service BI solution, even non-technical employees can answer complex questions that otherwise require a technical user to answer.

Develop a BI roadmap with goals

Prepare your cloud data warehouse for the integration of your BI platform of choice. Set a launch date for your BI platform. In your road map make sure to prepare for new business initiatives, customer behavior, and industry changes. It's important to create a solid BI strategy and set goals, this allows your organization to reap the full benefits of BI and drive the business forward.

Sigma as Your Enterprise Business Intelligence Solution

Sigma enables any organization in any industry to explore, analyze, and visualize all their data with ease, scale, speed, and flexibility to solve their use cases. Giving companies the ability to answer all of their data questions and ensure industry-leading products and services.

Sigma delivers cloud-scale analytics in a simple and familiar spreadsheet interface. Visualize data in the form of dashboards and empower your business users and data teams to easily explore, drill down, and collaborate with their data.

Let's Sigma together! Schedule a demo today.