Business intelligence (also called BI for short) is hardly a new concept – solutions that assist enterprises with an eye towards data analysis of business information have been widely used since the 1990s, if not longer. But just as technology in general has evolved enormously over the last decade in particular, the same is true of BI.
By getting a better understanding of where BI stands today, it can help us collectively identify where this powerful subset of technology might be headed. For many businesses in nearly any industry you can think of, that alone may be the best way to stand out in an increasingly crowded marketplace moving forward.
Business Intelligence Isn’t Exclusive to Big Organizations Any Longer
Maybe the most important thing to understand about the continued evolution of BI is that it’s no longer something that only large, national corporations with big workforces (and even bigger pocketbooks) get to enjoy.
According to a piece that originally ran in Forbes, small organizations with 100 employees or less actually had the highest rate of BI penetration or adoption in 2018. Much of this has to do with the fact that as business intelligence technology has grown more advanced, it’s also grown more accessible at roughly the same time.
Cloud-based business intelligence, for example, not only makes it possible to collect data from virtually anywhere – it also makes it possible to unlock the actionable insight hidden beneath all those 1s and 0s from any device someone might own with an active Internet connection. Indeed, it is predicted that worldwide revenues for both big data and business analytics solutions will hit a massive $189.1 billion by the end of the year (an increase of about 12% over 2018) and the cloud is one of the major reasons for it.
But more organizations simply having access to this modern flavor of business intelligence isn’t necessarily notable in and of itself. How they’re using that access, on the other hand, is.
These days, there is virtually no corner of a business that can’t benefit from the insight and intelligence that the right BI solution will bring to the table – and a variety of recent statistics reflect that. It makes perfect sense that, again according to Forbes, IT departments tend to have an above-average interest in cloud-based business intelligence in particular. However, the same source revealed that marketing and sales place a tremendous amount of importance on it as well.
Many operations departments also rely heavily on business intelligence to not only benchmark and improve their current processes, but to also optimize their legacy ones, too. In essence, they’re not just trying to figure out what works so they can double down on it. They’re trying to figure out what doesn’t work so they can devote attention to those areas, too.
While it’s absolutely true that there was a day where simply leveraging business intelligence at all was enough to give your organization a competitive advantage, that day has long since ended. Now, thanks to the advanced nature of these tools and their accessibility to even the smallest organization, the playing field is essentially level once again.
What statistics like those outlined above really tell us is that how you use that intelligence will become the new competitive advantage of the next decade. That means placing an emphasis not only on the tool itself, but on the quality of the data you’re feeding it and what you’re able to do with the insight revealed from it moving forward. Businesses who are able to grasp those key concepts are going to go far in the next few years. Businesses who can’t will soon find themselves left behind – if they haven’t already.
Contact us today to discuss optimizing your company’s business intelligence!
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