In today’s electronically interconnected world, the amount of data generated by business operations can have an inundating effect on enterprise systems. In this age of connectivity, businesses are flooded by a mountain of data which floods enterprise systems. To tackle this deluge, a number of big data technologies have emerged and businesses have deployed a variety of business intelligence (BI) solutions to identify patterns and trends within the data. As CIOs or other executives in IT departments, you may be often flummoxed by the plethora of Business Intelligence solutions. Should you initiate BI by implementing a Hadoop framework, or do you go for a more cost-effective, cloud-based system? Invariably, your business needs business intelligence!
How can you know if your company’s BI needs an overhaul? We have identified 4 signs that make it easy to see when a Business Intelligence solution is needed. Of course, you don’t have to wait until you see them all at once, and at least one is enough to raise a question mark.
1. Multiple apps & data sources but manual processing:
Does your organization have multiple business applications and data sources but the process of putting them together is still manual? Such unharmonized data landscapes are common once businesses start growing and often processing this data is tedious. Data assembled in this manner is unreliable. Vast amounts of data continuously flow from different sources, and it’s up to companies to decide how they will use this sea of information to their advantage. Most of the time it leads to inefficiency and poor decision making. By using a properly architected BI Solution, you eliminate inaccuracy, obtain precise information about your business, and make that everyone is on the same page.
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2. Complicated Reporting:
Is Your idea of business intelligence a spreadsheet? Does your monthly Report preparation loom before you as a cumbersome task? Using spreadsheets for analysis doesn’t mean you have business intelligence. Spreadsheet-based BI is a highly manual process that is prone to errors and often delivers outdated and inaccurate data. Studies show that up to 35 percent of information within a spreadsheet worked on by one or more employees can contain errors. Spreadsheet data containing time-sensitive information can also pose an accuracy problem, frequently needing to be manually updated. Modern BI solutions automatically create and deliver real-time reports accurately and efficiently, allowing decision makers to initiate a well-informed course of action.
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3. Lack of in-depth & customized data analysis:
Are you unable to perform an in-depth analysis of your data? Do you have to depend on IT for every bit of customization? That means analytics within your organization is practically nonexistent.
It is not uncommon for analysts to find that all or part of data sets are missing or historical data is not fully available. Without access to historical data, a business loses the opportunity to understand their true performance over time and the ability to predict future trends. Loss of data most commonly results in inaccurate or less reliable insights and with massive volumes coming from a lot of sources, handling big data can take a lot of work. In aggregate, this results in poorer decision making over time. Business intelligence can help companies avoid this. BI allows you to import and save historical data, and analyze for a range of different metrics, to give you well-rounded insights.
Quick Tip: Use Azure Analysis Services, an enterprise-grade data modeling tool which enables a BI professional to create a semantic model over the raw data in the cloud using a highly optimized in-memory engine to provide responses to user queries at the “speed of thought”.
4. It’s difficult to find important information:
When it comes to finding strategic information that goes beyond the daily operational requirements, it is not found. Important reports on sales statistics, cost analysis, and regional market saturation have to be hunted down and pulled together from different locations throughout the system. Trying to find the answer to a business decision that needs to be made by data analysis is like pulling teeth, requiring you to make special requests of employees to aggregate the data.
Not only is this taking away productive time from them, but it is not accessible to you in a timely fashion. This jeopardizes effective execution of mission-critical or time-sensitive decisions. BI solutions are designed to have the answers at your fingertips exactly when needed.
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Conclusion:
A business intelligence solution is an investment that cannot be ignored by organizations anymore. It is not a luxury, as was the case with decision support systems or MIS in the past. BI serves as an imperative need if an organization is to lock heads with its peers and gain the upper hand. A good BI solution is also not as expensive to implement these days as it used to be just a few years ago. Open source technologies, software as a service (SaaS), and cloud-based systems have made BI as affordable to the small and mid-sized organizations as to their larger counterparts
All things considered, is business intelligence something your organization needs now? CloudMoyo has delivered successful Business Intelligence & Analytics projects for its clients across multiple industries such as healthcare, transportation, pharma, retail. A lot of this success can be attributed to a thorough assessment of client landscape followed by a proof of concept on real live client data. Most of these clients were able to pursue their enterprise BI projects after a successful PoC. With its expertise in deploying cloud-based analytical solutions, CloudMoyo is the right partner for you to engage for your Big Data proof of concept.
Contact us to discover how easy it is to analyze, visualize your data and share insights with Microsoft Power BI.
