Companies across the globe are dealing with heaps of data that helps them strategize and plan their business growth. But analyzing a huge amount of data, categorizing it, storing it systematically, and then finding the right answers is a herculean task. Unless you have the best BI (Business Intelligence) Tools, deriving insights from that data will be nearly impossible. The right BI tool will help you transform a huge array of data into simple reports, giving you a better understanding of the market conditions to make well-informed decisions.
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What is a Business Intelligence and Analytic Tool?
Today, organizations have access to data about every aspect of their business. From Sales, Marketing, Workflow, and Productivity to hiring, HR management, and Profitability, the available data makes all these processes more efficient. However, most of this data is available in isolation and BI analytic tools help in making sense of the information. Firstly, BI tools can help bring all data together from different silos to provide one single source of data truth. Moreover, a BI tool enables users to see data from different vantage points by assisting them in slicing and dicing the data the way they want. It helps users to represent data in different visualization formats so that derived insight can easily be communicated.
Why do you need self-service analytics?
Self-service analytics is a part of BI that enables non-technical users to access data, analyze it and generate insightful reports without heavily relying on IT (Information Technology) teams.. This allows users to drive their own data analysis without depending on IT for l over data ingestion, reference and interpretation. While the primary aim of self-service analytics is to enable all business and non technical users to gain insights from their sphere of data, the benefits of self-serve analysis goes beyond that.
- Reduce dependence on IT
- Empower business users by making data analysis easy
- Self-dependence makes decision making faster
- Consistent data delivery across departments
- Cost-efficient since lesser people required for data analytics
Tips to choose the right BI Analytics Tool
BI Tools are designed to simplify life for those dealing with heaps of data. But how well a BI tool assists you will depend on the tool you choose. Since there are dozens of highly functional BI tools available, here are a few things you must consider while selecting the one that perfectly fits your requirements.
● Ease of use: One of the main aims of a BI tool is to make data analysis easy. Similarly, the tool itself should be easy to use so that even non-technical staff members can utilize it to create important reports. Simplicity must be the primary tenet of any BI tool
● Fast deployment: Any software, application, or program is deployed to make processes faster. So, the deployment of a BI tool should be easy and quick in itself so that businesses can benefit from it and see the ROI as soon as possible
● Fast response: A BI tool should be able to process and respond quickly to your query. Analyzing a large amount of data on a slow interface will further delay things.
● Self-serve, ad-hoc analysis: The BI analytic tool you choose should have features that provide ad-hoc analysis, which means, it should be able to provide detailed reports about several aspects, as and when required.
● No technical knowledge required: An ideal BI tool should be such that it demands no technical knowledge from the user to perform data analysis.
Mistakes to Avoid in Business Intelligence
Implementing Business Intelligence is extremely important in today’s competitive, data-driven business environment. Here are a few mistakes you must avoid while using BI.
- BI is not all technical: While IT will handle all the technical parts, you must include as many people as possible in data analysis, especially teams that identify and know your customers
- Make BI all-inclusive: You may want to start small but let everyone be part of your BI plan. Choose a BI analytics tool that is easy to use and requires minimum technical knowledge.
- Data silos: The entire purpose of BI analytics tools is to bring the data together and make sense of it as a whole. But if different teams work in silos, the efforts will never yield the right results. Centralized teams working on different data pools to provide for needs of different business users will only create below-par results.
BI mistakes are common but not unavoidable. BI tools are extremely versatile and provide you deep insights about where your business is headed and how you can grow it further. The idea is to choose the one that fits into your scheme of things and is simple and agile to use so that anyone in your organization can leverage it to make data driven decisions.Again, choose a tool which is Simple to use. One such BI tool is INSIA, it’s easy, accurate, and provides the desired results. Most importantly, Simplicity of use is the core USP of INSIA.
