What is Business Intelligence?
 
Business owners are getting a new type of advice to help their creative startup or middle market businessstand out in today’s market. They are seeking out knowledgeable firms to guide them into the world of business intelligence(BI), an emerging data analysis process aimed at boosting business performance by helping key decision makers collect, store, retrieve and analyze data to make better-informed decisions. These BI analytics offer new tools to help a company assess its business processes, performance, market trends and other factors in order to learn how to improve corporate marketing strategiesand internal operations. In short, they work smarter, not harder, to help your business connect with its target market. 
 
Business intelligence (BI) is technology-driven. The process differs from standard business analytics. It uses cutting edge tools for analyzing data to present actionable information that helps executives, managers, and marketers make informed business decisions.
 
A key benefit of BI adoption is coordinated awareness in an organization. Oftentimes, data is not accessible to everyone, causing misunderstandings, delays, and wrong decisions. Some of the wide variety of technical tools thatBusiness Intelligence containare applications and methods that allow organizations to collect data internally and externally; prep it for analysis; develop and run queries against that data; and create reports, dashboards and data visualizations to make the analytical results available to both upper level decision-makers andoperational level employees.
 
Social mediais unquestionably a large piece of the pie by which you will measure your company’s marketing success. You can ask your Business Intelligence consultant to provide you with a Social BI to integrate all the important metrics on various social media channels to determine the impact of your social media posts and interactions. Insights gathered can help you know exactly what kind of content interests your current and potential customers, which platform you need to focus more efforts on, how your brand is being talked about in social networks, and many more.
 
Traditionally, product developmentoften relied on gut or perception of what the consumers need or may sometimes be based on outdated information and algorithms. Business Intelligence is a practical solution to really know the current needs and demands of consumers, which you may leverage on to develop and enhance your product and service offerings to address these demands in a timely manner.
 
While this data helps direct corporate decision-making and optimize operational standards, BI technology also includes data visualization software for designing charts and other infographics, as well as tools for building creative dashboards and performance scorecards that display visualized data on business metrics and key performance indicators in an easy-to-grasp way.
 
But as with all emerging technology, business intelligence software and services can be a significant investment. How does it actually help your company, and is it a justifiable, worthwhile expense? While every business model varies, there is a very good chance it could be extremely valuable strategic move for your company. BI compiles a company’s most essential data so employees can focus on answering crucial questions. Access to data allows for fast decision making and an edge over the competition. The dashboards and reports created with BI tools can have far-reaching effects.