Art of BI: New Business Intelligence Tools

In today’s highly digitized world one could say that “Information is power.” However, in this age of digital revolution, it is only when that information is transformed to useful insights to the business, customer, and market trends that it brings power with it.

One challenge that most businesses face in generating power with this information is how to analyze huge volumes of information. Business Intelligence (BI) tools are the driving force that generates those useful insights from the ever-growing repository of information.

Business Intelligence has come a long way through the years. The involvement of big data, data science, and predictive analysis is changing the role BI had traditionally played across business applications. The traditional focus of BI was to analyze historical data in order to understand current trends.

Today, however, predictive analysis is at the core of BI. Also, BI is no longer only for large-scale, multi-national corporations. The influence of BI has caught up with small- to mid-scale businesses, allowing them to grow in smart ways.

“2016 is the year of modern BI and analytics platform,” says Rita Sallam, Research Vice President at Gartner. According to Sallam, BI is shifting from an IT-led service to a business-led self-serving model – the latest trend in the market.

Not only that, but cognitive intelligence is going to play a key role in the intelligent application domain in the coming years. Even Artificial Intelligence (AI) is automating workplaces using big data to replace the repetitive manual tasks. However, it’s important to note that whatever the technological trend, it always rotates around the information that a business possesses — its products, services, customers, competitors, and the market.

As mentioned earlier, BI is no longer limited to merely analyzing numbers generated by a business. Modern BI tools essentially have to include the capabilities of gauging text documents, user search criterion, website navigation, and providing insights to a business as to what those mean.

In this context, traditional BI tools will hardly satisfy the BI needs of the future. We need to be thinking of new tools and processes to cater to the evolving trends of business intelligence.

Chris Preimesberger writes in eWEEK:

“Enterprises will need a few new-gen tools to do this: secure storage and backup with encryption, solid and dependable data management, fast and intuitive analytics engines, and good data visualization (DV) all should be on that list.”

A recent Forbes article provides a good case study of what the next generation of BI tools is supposed to do. Those tools will analyze the purchasing patterns of a web user, along with the behaviors of the users from the same demographical/geographical region, which will provide insight into how they can be targeted for new products and services to meet their future demands. Once this insight is fed in the CRM system, it will be able to provide useful recommendations to the customer, allowing the customer to build a strong relationship with the business.

In other words, the next generation of analytics tools will be dealing with both structured and non-structured information, while also enabling businesses to use the insights for the applications of their choosing.

Now, that’s innovation!

To learn more about BI & Analytics tools, please contact Datavail today. With more than 600 database administrators worldwide, Datavail is the largest database services provider in North America. As a reliable provider of 24×7 managed services for applications, BI/Analytics, and databases, Datavail can support your organization, regardless of the build you’ve selected.