Two Things That Remain the Same in Business Intelligence- and That's a Good Thing!

Two things remain the same and will continue to be so with BI:

(i) Business Intelligence has always been a critical function that play's a role in board room decisions all the way down to the smallest departments in the business

(ii) The primary ingredient to get going on BI is DATA and in today’s world there is a lot of data

Traditional Business Intelligence is generally associated with either the CIO/CTO of the Organization and the software development life cycle (SDLC) process.

But, in the past 10 years, data visualization has made a considerable difference in the way BI has been perceived. For example, a data analyst working for a small team in a marketing department can now build the high-impact dashboards for C-level folks – serving up data and insights in an interactive and engaging format.

There are a few areas of focus that help in applying an agile and nimble approach to the way BI and Data Visualizations can make an impact.

For an Individual:

Dream big, but start small! Look for quick wins and have the willingness to go the extra mile.

For example, an executive in the organization could ask for a simple excel table on KPIs. Did we ever wonder why management is asking for just an excel report? It is not because they do not want sophisticated reporting; it is because that is the simplest and easiest way to explain the requirements and make it easy and understandable for the parties concerned.

Approach: Anyone can be merely an order taker and go back with the excel table. The opportunity is to consider using a data visualization tool at your disposal and add value to the task on hand -"A picture – especially an interactive one - is worth a thousand words." No one would say no if the alternate view is provided that delivers an intuitive understanding of the data and does a better job in the given context and time.

If you are a leader with the goal of making data-driven decisions, you have an opportunity to guide and enable your team to have access to the right data visualization tool to complement your team's deliverables, see them succeed and reap the promising benefits. When plenty of potential high-quality online resources available, we can have a head start right away.

For an Enterprise:

• Working in the BI space is the Crawl, Walk, and Run (CWR) approach. We do not want to invest in a tool or technology and find it challenging to make a change when it is obsolete. It is easy to apply the CWR approach in BI, and you just need some strategy around the implementation. Strategy on tool selection, licensing management, enterprise roll-our strategy, user training/adoption, and so on.
• AI and Big Data are part of everything in the world. So, how is it in BI? We have seen a lot of benefits in NLP data and BI coming together. There should be a scalable method to achieve the desired results. Look at the article from Tomas Larsson, VP of Data Science at Blend360 on Text mining and NLP. Wouldn't it be nice to have an insightful dashboard built-in data visualization tools based on an API call to the NLP data, and filter by the segment or cohort that is in review?

BLEND360 & BI

At BLEND360, we strive for more than just a BI solution, but a solution that will add value and makes a difference in the long run, tailored to every organization/team's need. Be it for a department or an enterprise, and we take a user-centric approach to the problem in hand. The adage Awake and arise and stop not till the goal is reached fits in here, and we are here to shoulder your BI needs.

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