Business Intelligence (BI) has been a hot topic for many years now. The terms “Data Warehouse” and “Business Intelligence” have been in use in the IT industry for a while, and include technology solutions that can provide organizations important benefits to improve the decision making process. This technology is applied to give support decision making, but at various times the projects for its implementation reflect bad decisions only. So to improve your processes, it is fundamental to have the correct information at the right time and place. The decisions should be made in a highly complex reality, which converge a high number of variables that are at play; and at the same time has an infinite amount of possibilities.
Furthermore, it may seem that little time is devoted, and this means taking into account only what you feel and have on sight at the time, not considering past bearings of the history of the organization that give a panorama, to be analyzed, that leads to a different decision.
Information systems in general, Business Intelligence solutions in particular, are essential tools to support decision making. They offer solutions that may be vital, as they provide information that detect the problems on which a decision must be made, develop alternatives, evaluate possible consequences and subsequent monitoring when taken into action.
This is a huge market, with big players like Microsoft, Cognos, IBM, SAS, Business Objects, and SPSS. What sort of decisions do they help to take? Some examples are “how to reduce costs”, “better planning of the flow of products and information in the company”, “a better understanding of customers (which are worthy of credit? and which are at risk of changing over to a competitor product?) and etc.
Customer interaction varies according to the type of activity that an organization is involved in (distribution, transportation, banking, insurance, automotive). In order for an organization to maintain adequate communication with customers and offer them better services, the “right time” and the relevance of its proposals and communications should be controlled. The organization should keep in mind the customer profile, past and present behavior in all of the markets, and this is for all the contacts that it needs to manage, not just the ones it plans for. For this, it should have access to all relevant information of the organization, and use it at the appropriate time secondly (second, hour, week, and year).
To address these issues, it must be coordinate well the processes they use and customers and customer data, this way it is possible to personalize communications and manage the customer experience, so that they feel recognized, understood and controlled across a permanent dialogue.
As the Business Intelligence market was consolidating and maturing, new trends emerged according to advances in IT technology.
The most significant in the past years are Cloud Computing and Virtualization, which both establish a new model to improve efficiencies in costs and gain agility from Data Warehousing solutions. For CEOS, this is a tool that they will prioritize now and in the future because of its advantages.
The rise of Pervasive BI (generalized Business Intelligence), through which the organizations allow their Business Intelligence capacities be extended to customers, suppliers and to people who make tactical decisions with a special emphasis in the utilization of BI to support operative decision making. The objective is to ease tactical decision making through the establishment of data storage that stores past data as well as real time data, this would be accessible instantly. This way reduces the delay or latency between events and the action that should be taken.
Some organizations prefer to migrate towards Data Marts process. These tools have the purpose of helping a specific area in the business in making better decisions. Organizational information can be lumped together, explored and spread in multiple forms so that diverse groups of users can exploit the processed information in the most convenient form according to their needs. They have an integral focus of Data Warehouse, which involves radical changes in a way that builds solutions for OLAP (On Line Analytical Processing), data mining and integration.
The integration of non-traditional data in the Data Warehouse, including non-structured and semi-structured data, as is the case with information generated by social networks on the Internet, in which consumers generate a large amount of opinions about companies in the telecommunication, banking and airline industries, information that can only be processed by using technology and advanced analytics processes.
The need to add the information that social networks offer is a consequence of advances in IT technology, changes in work formats and current consumer behaviors, the impact that online opinion and social networks have on marketing initiatives is notable.
There was an increase in investment on BI solutions during the year, IT organizations and CEOs are pressured to take advantage of all the information that they have from using BI solutions, which are ever more sophisticated. This increase in the investment on Business Intelligence strategies will continue in the coming years.
Other needs are also rising like Location Intelligence, BI solutions should incorporate the capacity to assign, visualize and understand data from a geographic viewpoint, because over 80 percent of collected data by organizations have a spatial element and manufactures are starting to offer mapping integrated into their BI platforms. The capacity to superimpose demographic or statistical date over a map gives an additional level of analysis; it adds to a person’s interpretation the combination of geographic data with traditional/standard business data, this way users have the knowledge and context to make better decisions.
We cannot help mentioning BI solutions for mobile device, the ability to place reports and analysis in the hands of those who make decision wherever they are located through their favorite mobile device has intensified this year. The possibility to make immediate decisions in any place beat out the concerns over security and integration.
The potential benefits are significant. It improves customer sales, service and support, more efficient and coordination of business operations and processes; rapid deployment of BI applications, analysis and services. Fast and easy access to executive information.
The consultant Gartner has predicted that analysis on mobiles will continue to be a popular trend and one of the priorities until the end of 2015; the rates of change over the next four years will be breathtaking. On the other hand, smartphones and tablets represent more than 90 percent of the new net growth in device adoption over the next four years. Tablets and iPads will dominate the new implementation of mobile BI.
The facilities provided by new IT technologies are countless, such as the proposed BI solutions, encouraging professionals and business analyst to incorporate and invest at a higher number in their organizations.
If there are so many benefits, businesses will have to live with multiple Business Intelligence tools. This multiple solutions are caused by the demand that business users ask for easier and more flexible tools and that place the power of analytics in their own hands. Without a doubt, they will continue to evolve according to the demands by organizations and the sustained growth in IT technologies.
