Large corporations regularly handle piles of data, including their expenditures, customer interactions, etc. Business intelligence (BI) integration can help them increase data efficiency, optimize internal flows and turn the company’s weaknesses into strengths.
This post will reveal how to properly integrate business intelligence, its importance, BI benefits for businesses, the tools needed for this complicated process, and more necessities.
The Essence of Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is a common term unifying a range of tools, technologies, and solutions that may be used to acquire and analyze raw business data. Typically, BI solutions contain advanced analytics services (e.g., statistical analysis, text mining, predictive analytics, etc.). You can also request necessary stats, customize dashboards, or prepare analytics visualizations using self-service BI settings.
According to Zion Market Research investigations, the global BI market value was $22.16 billion in 2020 and is expected to reach $42.95 billion by 2028. An increasing number of entrepreneurs (Gartner predicts that more than 33% of companies will use BI by 2023) are using such a beneficial tool for business growth.
BI market value stats on the example of North America
What’s the reason for such popularity? BI greatly assists in personalizing services, defining new techniques to increase sales and profit, completing exact projections, and various other business growth activities.
BI compiles data from the company’s history to arrive at the most effective business decisions. For that purpose, business analysts use various working methods, such as text analytics, data collection, or corporate analytics.
Types of Business Intelligence Solutions and Instruments
We’ll discuss some of the widespread BI solutions for businesses.
Online analytical processing (OLAP) is one of the early BI tools, particularly useful for complex searches and analyses.
Ad hoc analysis is used to create and run queries to investigate certain aspects of organizations.
Mobile Business Intelligence allows users to access user-friendly BI applications via their mobile devices.
Real-time BI solutions allow for the processing of streaming data and decision analytics applications like credit scoring, stock trading, and targeted promotional offers.
Cloud BI focuses on multi-cloud compatibility, letting businesses launch BI apps on many cloud platforms.
Embedded business intelligence enables business owners to study data inside their applications completing particular tasks.
The Reasons to Implement Business Intelligence
Using business intelligence is a means to maximize the value of data gathered. Let’s take a look at the list of opportunities and functions it includes:
- Defining the company’s weaknesses
- Making workflow improvements
- Identifying techniques for earnings increase.
- Examining the customer’s behavior.
- Comparing your findings to your competitors’ ones
- Studying market trends
BI would be helpful for your business if your staff lacks productiveness and the large volume of data collected has no further use. It would also help you if your business suffers from customers outflow, but you’ve got no more time and resources to deal with such a problem.
Why Business Intelligence is Beneficial for Businesses
BI is crucial for businesses of any size is that it effectively assists in making business decisions based on prepared analytical data. Let’s look at the other advantages.
Detailed and reliable reports. BI can handle a variety of data sources and turn them into informative and trustworthy reports. This way, the business owner will be fully informed about every indicator concerning the company’s success.
Pattern recognition. BI may help you with the market and competitor research and discovering trends. This way, you’ll be the first to notice new trends and take advantage of this opportunity.
Risk control. BI greatly protects sensitive data, prevents fraud, and lowers various risks. Fintech companies, for example, use BI to create safe intelligence platforms to reduce fraud and cyber assaults.
Budget. Nevertheless, BI may appear pretty expensive, the investments provided will be soon repaid. Moreover, it will be much simpler to not only make profitable business decisions but also to improve performance or reduce expenses and resources, etc.
Some more advantages of BI implementation for your business
Business Intelligence: Steps to Integrate into Your Business
Let’s cover the most vital steps of BI integration in your company flows.
1. BI integration roadmap creation will reduce development time, making easier critical parameters definition and preparing a functionality list. What should you do about that?
Identifying BI integration goals and objectives (e.g., business scaling, boosting profit, improving business strategy, etc.) is the first step in planning. You should also make a list of business needs that will assist you in achieving your goals.
Setting key performance indicators (KPIs) will be helpful to make progress monitoring and observation easier, depending on your business specialization. They should be quantifiable, transparent, and adhere to previously established goals.
The next step is to transfer the scope of work to your team. If you don’t have any, use one of the three main hiring options below:
Freelancers. Despite its low cost, this approach has some flaws that make it unsuitable for successful business intelligence adoption. For example, freelance employees frequently demand upfront payment or just leave your project without saying a word.
The in-house team formation is advantageous for its closeness and efficient communication. However, this option is too expensive, as it necessitates paying staff, covering office rent, obtaining high-quality hardware and software, etc.
Software development outsourcing provides for both product development costs reduction and time to market decrease. IT outsourcing vendors already have an office and a full staff of professionals with extensive expertise. They assume all development-related tasks and bill clients only for completed work.
You may partially outsource your tech tasks or even an entire project, obtaining a top-quality product and saving your financial resources while collaborating with vendors.
2. Choosing a BI solution to work in is one of the most challenging parts of the business intelligence installation process. First, you should study the BI market and examine the current solutions after determining which BI solution is suited for you and compiling a list of needs and features in the specification document.
3. Integrating BI solutions will be successful if you pay attention to the points below.
Data cleaning, processing, and analysis mean you should correct or delete incomprehensible, inaccurate, or outdated information. After that, choose data processing techniques.
Improvements. BI solutions should scale parallelly with your company’s growth. To gain this purpose, you may start with the most important features first and work on improving your product afterward.
Personnel training. First and foremost, you should explain why business intelligence is being implemented, its relevance, and values, as well as aid workers in gaining new information by training and directing them.
4. Getting profit from business intelligence apps. After completing all the above, you can use the BI software to optimize company operations, improve corporate strategy, and distribute resources and investments fairly and accurately utilizing the final findings.
How to Implement BI Solutions: a More Closer Look
Let’s find out more about the business intelligence architecture implementation.
Step 1: Choose your infrastructure, environment, and platform.
If you don’t have the infrastructure, the first step is to choose a data storage solution. Then, while building the BI solution, you must choose the appropriate environment: on-premise, cloud-based, or hybrid.
BI environment: options to choose
Step 2: Create a system architecture that considers availability.
Maintain a healthy relationship between availability and resources. High accessibility requires significant expenditures, but no minimal financial investments in accessibility might harm decision-making skills.
Step 3: Information architecture: prepare BI building blocks.
The building blocks (e.g., dimensions, metrics, pecking order, or relationships) let BI developers and clients arrange data and reorganize it properly.
Business Intelligence Integration Costs
Various cost-forming elements determine the cost of a BI installation project. Let’s talk about the essential ones.
- Quantity of data resources (ERP, CRM, HRM, EHR, etc.).
- The amount of data tables and columns to conduct the analysis.
- The data cleansing process complexity
- The amount of machine learning algorithms
- Report quantity and complexity
- The total number of dashboards, etc.
The approximate time estimate for the BI installment process will be the following:
- 3-4 months of development (2190- 2920 hours)
- 2-4 weeks of user training (336- 672 hours)
- 2-3 weeks of launch (336- 504 hours)
The approximate price estimate based on a $50 hourly rate equals $143,100 – $204,800.
Wrapping Up
Business intelligence solutions are powerful instruments to improve decision-making and optimize internal business flows. However, their implementation is quite a complex procedure requiring the assistance of a skillful software development team. The experts will answer all of your disturbing business questions and help to develop a flawless and modern BI solution profitable for your company.
