Organizations need big data analysis to gain a comprehensive and continuous understanding of their data. Many of these successful organizations utilize business intelligence platforms or solutions to help them gather, understand and visualize this data. This subsequently makes up the backbone of their intelligence strategy. This type of solution is often referred to as a business information platform.
What is a Business Intelligence Platform?
A Business Intelligence Platform is a technological solution that helps businesses and enterprises to collect, understand, and interpret their data. This is done not only to make better and more informed decisions but also to turn their data into a competitive advantage. This effectively provides businesses with endless opportunities to grow, add value, and outperform their competition or threats. If you're wondering what is BI platform, it's a category of tools that enables data reporting, visualization, and decision-making support.
The data can be sourced from multiple entry points such as databases, emails, survey responses, and internet activity, to build insights that can improve an organization's intelligence strategy.
Why is Business Intelligence Important?
Businesses today are generating more data about their customers and operations than ever before. In fact, the World Economic Forum estimates that by 2025, 463 exabytes of data will be generated every day globally. This Big data presents businesses with various opportunities for success. It provides companies with incredible value when analyzed and utilized correctly.
Unfortunately, more often than not, companies are not doing this well. The sheer amount of data collected has created a significant challenge for many organizations. The main problem is that they are only using a small percentage of this data to make informed decisions, or in the worst-case scenario, not using any at all. In many of these events, organizations are not so sure what to do with their data.
Ultimately, this can actually cost an organization. Unused or misused data costs a business in the form of lost opportunities, lower efficiency and productivity, quality concerns, increased threat attacks, and more. It can become even more costly when a malicious threat actor has breached the data due to poor intelligence on the organization's behalf. Therefore, business intelligence that is rooted in accurately analyzed and visualized data provides immense value.
The advantages of implementing Business Intelligence Solutions
Here are some other advantages of implementing an enterprise business intelligence platform in your organization. These benefits illustrate the true value of using a business intelligence platform in day-to-day operations.
- Improve visibility. Business Intelligence Platform helps companies have better control and visibility of their data. It collects and interprets data that would otherwise be missed due to the sheer volume of data available for organizations, illuminating all areas and aspects of your organization for improvement and insights.
- Real-time, accurate insights. BI Platform can quickly pull a large amount of Big data together and analyze it in real-time. This enables leaders to make accurate and reliable decisions based on groundbreaking information they are receiving without the red tape and time it takes to manually pull reports together. Companies then have the advantage of being adaptable and abreast of the latest developments.
- Actionable information. An effective BI Platform doesn't just collect and analyze big data; it provides business leaders with insights into the trends and patterns of data that allow companies to make decisions based on the information provided and act accordingly. These are key features of BI platforms that enable fast action.
- Efficiency improvements. Enterprise business intelligence platforms support efficient operations by acting on business intelligence that accurately reflects a company. As the insights from the data can be widely shared and easily visualized, teams can eliminate redundancies quickly, and employees can shift their focus to more meaningful work instead of manually processing data.
Through all the above, Business Intelligence Platforms provide organizations with an unmatched competitive advantage. It helps companies understand and manage the vast quantities of data they accumulate. Most importantly, it works off your company's data, making it invaluable as no competitor can replicate it. These advantages highlight the benefits of using a BI platform in a competitive business landscape.
How does a BI Platform work? Common features and purposes
A Business Intelligence Platform aims to develop a data-driven culture that involves the workforce using data analytics, statistics, and insights to optimize their processes and operations. They enable organizations to accomplish tasks better and increase the bottom line. Here is how it works. In essence, this is what a business intelligent platform is designed to do.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are several examples of how businesses can use a business intelligence solution. One example is it can help you discover and analyze specific types of risky behavior. It does this by generating reports about network traffic, logging all users' unauthorized internet access, and analyzing bandwidth step-by-step to find the root cause of network issues. Based on this information and data, companies can better protect their assets and information. They are also able to be more proactive in their defense strategy.
No. They are more advanced and cloud-based, the implementation doesn’t require a complete upheaval of existing IT systems. In fact, systems can work simultaneously in many cases. Sometimes, additional systems may be necessary to connect existing infrastructure with the BI Platform.
Yes. In most cases, BI solutions can easily integrate data using APIs from various data collections points. So it is an ideal solution for the existing infrastructure. Think of a BI Platform as the missing puzzle that connects all your infrastructure and information.
