Why Do You Need to Invest in Business Intelligence Software?

Updated on :February 11, 2025
By :Eugene Berko

Business intelligence (BI) first surfaced in a 1958 paper published by IBM. Countless organizations have since benefited from BI. Yet, even though BI is an established business tool, many companies lag behind their competitors because they underestimate its transformative power.

Why would any organization ignore or neglect a tool that can transform business growth? The answer may be a lack of understanding of business intelligence and its capabilities. After all, BI is a broad term that can easily get lost in a cloud of data-driven initiatives.

Every data initiative and the associated preponderance of vendors take unique marketing angles. There's an ever-growing vocabulary, too, while the rapid pace of change in the BI market further complicates matters. For instance, augmented analytics sounds apart from established business intelligence, even though it essentially falls under the same umbrella.

Irrespective of the initiative, vendor, or industry parlance, BI comes down to the same thing!

Business intelligence is about harnessing data to improve operations and customer service, grow revenue, and give strategic decision-makers actionable information.

This article will answer questions such as what modern-day BI does and why it matters for business success. We will also outline typical use cases. Then, we will look at the importance of self-service BI and consider its future.

What Does Modern-Day BI Accomplish?

While the BI market is established, it continues to grow. Statista suggests it will grow from USD 14.3bn in 2019 to USD 16.5bn in 2023. Yes, BI has penetrated deeply into daily business operations, but some companies still do not use it effectively. In a growing BI market, what features and benefits do companies risk losing out on?

Collecting, Centralising, and Unifying Data

Perhaps the most crucial role BI software plays is the ability of BI solutions to bring together countless data sources. With no concerted effort, business data is likely to sit in silos, but BI tools bring siloed data together into a central data analytics environment.

As a result, organizations have a broader and deeper capacity for data analysis and enjoy more data visibility. BI tools also link previously disconnected sources so that broader patterns and trends can be easily identified across multiple, discrete data sets.

Reports and Dashboarding

BI tools provide easy, effective ways to generate reports from existing business data. These reports are not just rows of numbers; a modern BI tool will deliver an interactive dashboard that allows users to manipulate data on the fly. With drag-and-drop actions, users can quickly distill complex reports into easy-to-digest insights.

Reports matter; a company can have valuable data with critical insight. BI-driven reporting helps decision-makers extract the value contained in this data. User-friendly dashboards allow executives to extract knowledge instantly and rapidly, using ranking reports, for example.

Monitoring KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) help an organization monitor its performance over time. A dip or rise in KPIs may indicate problems ahead. However, compiling and reviewing KPIs is a time-consuming process.

BI solutions simplify setting up, monitoring, and responding to KPIs. They can also automatically flag indicators out of range to ensure your business responds rapidly to any cause for concern.

What-If and Scenario Analysis

Decisions are often made under uncertain circumstances. BI tools make it easy to evaluate different scenarios based on existing business data. Executives can depend on business intelligence software to do automatic scenario analysis, highlighting how a change in circumstances will affect outcomes.

The power of BI lies in its ability to automate the What-If process. There is no need to simplify scenarios manually; modern-day BI tools fluently present dashboard scenarios and have a high degree of interactivity. Endless scenarios can be rapidly evaluated using visual BI tools.

The features I listed are the bread and butter of a typical BI solution. Of course, BI is a vast and complex field that covers capabilities such as location intelligence and collaborative BI. We'll address We'llof the cutting-edge BI features in a later section.

Yes, an organization can get by without access to BI features, but a complete lack of BI capabilities will encumber any size of business. Free and open-source business intelligence software tools exist for those who can't spend money.

Why BI Matters for Business Success

Let's consider that business intelligence platforms are important in business operations, growth, and strategy.

BI Delivers Operational and Customer Success

Data insight relieves inefficiencies and bottlenecks, improving the pace of business operations and saving money in the process—operations in almost every industry benefit. Whether improving stock control in a hospitality business or efficiently maintaining industrial plants, analytics can iron out kinks in business operations.

Companies that leverage BI have happier customers, too. Data drives customer knowledge, which means products and services are more closely tailored to customer needs and wants. With BI, companies can adapt to their clients more rapidly, consistently delivering relevant customer experiences throughout their interactions with clients. In turn, BI boosts customer retention.

Data and Business Intelligence Drive Revenue

BI tools can help organizations ask better questions. For example, making comparisons using interactive BI dashboards is much easier. Dashboards can instantly identify sales weaknesses, successful products, or lucrative customer segments.

BI also informs marketing activities. Contemporary solutions can even grade individual business leads for follow-up. Furthermore, BI helps companies derive ideal pricing strategies, stay ahead of competitors, and maximize customer spending.

Business Intelligence Software data and graphs

Executives Make Better Strategic Decisions With BI

Fast and accurate reporting means senior executives can make better decisions more quickly. Indeed, modern BI platforms deliver live data dashboards that lead to proactive decision-making. Businesses that respond to market changes faster than their competitors have an undeniable advantage over them.

Business intelligence also plays a vital role in risk management. The What-If analysis helps executives understand the impact of adverse scenarios and respond more quickly to changing circumstances.

The power of data and BI is not a matter of theoretical or mere sales rep chit-chat. In practice, business leaders put massive importance on the value of data and business intelligence.

A 2019 Forrester survey found that 89% of companies surveyed considered data a significant business opportunity, and 96% of respondents actively planned to or had already implemented data-driven decision-making.

In other words, if your organization is not using a BI platform to drive business performance, you can be almost sure that your competitors are.

Examples of BI Use Cases

What does a business intelligence platform mean for the practical and day-to-day? Here are five use cases illustrating how BI drives everyday organizational outcomes.

Leading Insurer

South African insurer Santam deployed a BI product with predictive analytics to detect fraud, speed up claim processing (by 50%), and improve overall decision-making. The project led to significant cost reductions, with an overall ROI of 244%.

Large Fast-Food Chain

McKinsey reports how a restaurant with thousands of outlets uses data to turn its business around, creating happier customers while driving revenue growth. The BI solution focused on helping the chain make more out of its employees, reducing employee turnover. BI helped the company identify the importance of shift length and hands-on management.

A Specialist Retailer

With a retail store and online presence, REI provides specialty outdoor products through its 12,000-employee business. BI delivers improved customer analytics that gives the retailer an advantage over competitors. Thanks to REI's BI platform, the retailer optimized marketing and better identified vital growth opportunities.

Further Education

Illustrating how the ease-of-use factor of BI platforms is a big draw, Portland State University suggests that it found that the accessibility provided by a BI platform delivered benefits in monitoring enrollment and in settling on budgets. Overall, the university indicates that BI's ability to access KPIs quickly and critical reports highly depends on its ability.

A Global Law Firm

BI can deliver effective solutions to challenging problems. Bryan Cave, a law firm with over 800 lawyers then, needed a way to shift from hourly billing to fixed pricing. BI delivered the insights that Bryan Cave required to understand how to calculate client bills in a way that offers the correct perception of value to the client.

The above outlines clear, practical use cases for BI. However, companies often hesitate to deploy software tools such as business intelligence because they perceive maximizing their utility will require ongoing expenses, such as paying qualified technical staff or persistent consulting fees.

The Case for Self-Service

Over time, BI platforms developed the ability to offer organizations a high degree of self-service.

In other words, your company's operational and executor can take advantage of BI without paying consultants or employing expensive, in-house technical staff.

BI software helps the decision makers in crucial decisions

Self-service BI reduces the costs of business intelligence platforms and ensures that the vital data insights it delivers are more accessible across the organization. It provides the following benefits.

One Version of the Truth

With democratic access to data across the organization, all decision-makers can conveniently access the same facts. There's no need to circulate sprThere's that may be outdated by the time they are viewed. Collaborating on data analysis becomes far more convenient.

Users Answer Their Own Questions

Technical teams and consultants will have a specific view of relevant questions, and this view may differ from what's relevant to the executive who runs the day-to-day operations. Self-service BI enables those executives to ask questions as soon as they come to mind.

Decisions Are Data-Backed

Senior staff often don't have the time or patience to request and wait for a BI-backed report. Self-service BI delivers instantly accessible reporting. In turn, business decisions are more often data-backed than used to be the case. As a result, businesses operate far more efficiently, gaining a competitive advantage.

Self-Service Is Fool-Proof

BI tools can be challenging to manage and use correctly, but self-service tools can be used by anyone who can competently use a productivity suite. That means that everyone in an organization can comfortably use BI tools.

While BI used to be restricted to the technically skilled or, indeed, to executive teams with a sufficient expense account, self-service means that the entire organization has access to powerful business intelligence tools.

For many organizations, self-service makes a case for BI.

Current Trends in Business Intelligence

I've started this article by pointing to the long-standing prominence of business intelligence (BI) as a decision-making tool. BI constantly evolves and grows in capabilities as technology delivers more opportunities to extract insights and predictions from data. I think BI will see advances in the following three areas.

Business Intelligence for Big Data

Big data refers to the growing volume of data collected by organizations and the increasing propensity of companies to collect and process more data. It has three growth aspects: more volume, increased velocity, and a greater variety of data.

How can organizations maximize the value of big data? One way is to use a BI tool as a front-end for big data. BI can cut across the panoply of big data sources, stitching together data and allowing executives to use the simplicity of BI to extract insights from vast big data pools.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics is not a new development. It can look beyond the past and make suggestions about the future. It relies on predictive models and algorithms to help executives make future decisions based on concrete data-driven predictions rather than hunches or judgments.

However, predictive analytics used to be the preserve of large enterprises with deep pockets. Predictive analytics is increasingly being packaged alongside BI tools, using the same dashboard-driven, end-user-friendly approach.

Augmented Analytics

Some call it the third generation of business intelligence. Augmented analytics boost current BI capabilities by applying AI technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing to the existing BI toolset.

Augmented analytics surfaced a few years ago, but we now see more widespread use of features such as intuitive, natural language searches. It is set to transform the analytics workflow by making data injection easier and more readily and intelligently recognizing patterns in data.

The BI Proposition

Surveys show that most companies of scale already deploy business intelligence software. In this article, we've made a comprehensive case for using BI software. Most businesses make a rational choice when opting for a BI solution.

Have you tried the top business intelligence software solutions, such as CarvGrow.comDatapineTableauPower-BI, etc.? If so, remember to post a review here.

Besides, with the low technical and capital barrier to entry, there is little excuse for ignoring the benefits of business intelligence software.

Eugene Berko
Eugene Berko

Eugene Berko is a data architect and Head of Big Data Office at ELEKS. He has 9 years of experience with data-centric solutions of various nature including DWH, big data, MPP, cloud-native systems and solutions revolving around machine learning.

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