Top 10 Trends in Database Management #7: Business Intelligence and Analytics

Everywhere you turn, you find another connected device. Sensors, safety equipment, vehicles, building systems and even your break room microwave can access the network and deliver a wealth of data.

This exponential increase in data-collecting devices results in a big data world that’s, quite frankly, overwhelming at times. That’s where business intelligence and analytics comes in.

BI software takes that immense set of raw data and helps you discover actionable insights from it. You can use this information for many applications, including real-time processing. A few use cases include running auction markets for securities, dynamically offering prices on airline tickets, serving the right ad inventory through a programmatic advertising platform and powering sharing economy services.

Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE) and Microsoft Power BI are two of the many BI platforms that are available. They can analyze data across the organization and present it with interactive visualizations. You can use the platform to look at the likely results of various scenarios, which allows you to make strategic business decisions. This data-driven approach gives you an objective perspective when you consider short- and long-term business goals.

You have a steep learning curve at the outset of adopting a BI solution. It’s impossible to get the best results out of the box. The first step, and one that enterprises commonly get caught up on, is integrating the data that is siloed throughout various departments, teams, offices, divisions and sub-entities, and creating a single source of truth. In many cases, companies use DBMSs that aren’t similar. They’re incapable of working with the integrated data flow without some serious changes.

The best way to resolve this situation is to bring in a partner that can make sense of the data, learn the business, and how is plays together. When you know how people currently operate, you can tailor the BI solution to their needs. This will allow you to use your data in ways never thought of like making better business decisions, machine learning, predictive analytics, etc.

When you take the time to align the BI platform with the business needs, you maximize the value of your data and receive insights that can be game-changers for your organization.