[Infographic] Benefits of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) can be an incredibly powerful and effective tool when used correctly, yet only 38% of firms reported they were utilising BI and focusing on creating a more data-driven organisation as recently as 2020.

Clearly, there is a disconnect between businesses and their data.

Therefore, we have created a simple infographic to give you a quick overview of how BI will benefit your business including recent industry stats. 

Business intelligence is a form of descriptive analytics that takes historical or real-time data from an organisation, processes it, and presents the results in visual reports. The high-level goal of business intelligence is to find out what happened, why it happened, and what should be done differently to achieve strategic business goals. 

Businesses intelligence results are intended to be distributed within an organisation to share findings across departments, and with the advancement of technology, BI dashboards have become increasingly popular. BI dashboards offer a more visual and interactive experience that aids creative thinking and decision-making. 

These dashboards incorporate the three core concepts of business intelligence: 

1. Data analysis
2. Data visualisation
3. Reporting capabilities

The process carried out by business intelligence solutions sees data extracted from its original sources, integrated into a storage system or holding area, then transformed into a structure or model that fits the query language. Then, business analysts or other professionals make queries; the results are presented as visualisations on dashboards and reports. The insights generated from this process inform operational decisions and business strategies - ensuring that actual data informs each move a company makes. 

It’s this clear process and the valuable insight it produces that has seen BI solutions accelerate to the level they sit at today. Interestingly, of those companies who have adopted BI, 54% now deem it either critical or very important to their ongoing and future initiatives. 

And why wouldn’t they, considering the clear benefits. Businesses’ who are actively investing in their business intelligence have reported: 

• Improved decision making  
• Increased organisational efficiency and productivity   
• Improved customer experience  
• Banished data silos  
• Improved competitive advantage

If you'd like to read more about the benefits and challenges of business intelligence you can check out our full post here.