You might recall planning car journeys with a trusty AA UK atlas. Whilst these roadmaps held lots of information and provided drivers with potential routes available to make a journey, over time this information became outdated. Changing factors such as new roads mean that the information becomes less accurate and useful for drivers. As a result, nowadays they require more detailed information such as traffic reports to better plan their journey. What drivers find the most useful is a satnav with GPS that can account for any disruptions such as traffic congestion thanks to its data being regularly refreshed. With this information, it can also recommend new routes, allowing the driver to make informed decisions about the best route and course of action.
Whereas traditional reporting methods are more similar to the AA UK atlas, a modern business intelligence (BI) platform is much like a high-tech satnav. Traditional reporting often only utilises a small subset of the available data which can lead to further questions needing to be answered, which requires input from analytical resources. On the other hand, a modern BI platform is designed to bring all of the available data into a centralised space. This allows the user to build a stronger understanding of any trends in the data and ultimately make data-led decisions.
The role of BI analytics
For many businesses, business intelligence transforms data into a form that enables understanding through data visualisations. These visualisations tell the story behind the data, allowing users to understand the trends, correlations and risks that need to be assessed. With BI tools, data becomes more distilled, and businesses gain the advantage of better oversight over all of their data.
Typically, business intelligence uses historical data to inform future outlook and interrogates the data to identify causes and explanations. It allows users to ask vital questions about what has happened within a data set and why, identifying opportunities for cost reduction and new revenue generation. With this insight, risk is mitigated and data-driven decisions can be made with confidence.
If implementing business intelligence solutions is the next step in your data strategy, or you’re looking to enhance your capabilities, Dufrain is here to help. Read on to learn more about the strategic advantages, emerging technologies and future outlook for BI.
Emerging BI technologies
As popular BI platforms, Power BI and Tableau are regarded as market-leading tools for their ability to produce modern reporting. In recent releases, they have also included more artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) features. By running algorithms, these tools can accommodate questions about the data that users might not think to ask. The AI capabilities mean that the tools also learn which information is useful for a business. As businesses and their users become more technologically driven and demand more insights, they’ll increasingly leverage these tools.
Beyond Tableau and Power BI, self-service tools like Looker and Amazon Quicksight are emerging. The user interface of these tools appears more like a search engine, so users can type questions into them and receive graphs and charts to visualise their data. This is fuelling the shift to self-service functionality, which we’ll explore more in-depth later on.
Five business intelligence trends you should know about
Governance
Often, the organic proliferation of BI technologies within businesses causes challenges that have to be addressed down the line. A balance has to be found between the provision of key data to aid users in making informed decisions and the control of information to mitigate risks. This is only set to rise in the coming years.
Without the correct governance, organisations will develop common issues such as non-performant reporting or receiving multiple different answers to the same question. If you can master your data governance, you will have a tool that adds real value, helps to identify opportunities and mitigates risks in your organisation. However, if administered incorrectly, your BI platform can lose the trust and confidence of its users, becoming another underutilised expense on your bottom line.
Natural language querying
The development of natural language BI tools is set to continue rising, offering business users a search engine-style experience. These natural language querying (NLQ) tools allow users to type questions like “How many units did I sell last year?” and then be presented with a value. But the capabilities can also extend to answering “How many units did I sell last year by month and region?”. The user is then presented with a visualisation of the data telling them all of the relevant information.
Challenger technologies have offerings exclusively in this format, whilst more established platforms like Tableau and Power BI are refining their offerings around this area. Developments in this area, including improvements to synonym detection, reduce the need for end users to know the names of specific fields to achieve desired insights. This results in a more intuitive user experience, ensuring higher levels of engagement.
AI
The ability of modern BI tools to recommend insights to users is increasing with time. Back in the early stages of development, BI tool reporting was fairly prescriptive and required feature development to get new information to the end user. Now, these reports harness AI functionality to interrogate the data environment and identify data correlations that help to explain trends.
This provides the end user with insights that aren’t just restricted to the questions that they think to ask. Removing this limitation is hugely advantageous for users who are less familiar with an organisation’s data. It also helps to significantly reduce the time required to understand problems and make business decisions to solve them.
Data quality
As more users utilise BI tools to explore data and derive insights, the need for data quality will only increase. Incorrect or incomplete data can heavily skew insights and cause vital decisions to be made based on incorrect information. As a result, data quality and observability reporting are on the rise. Insights about the characteristics of the data itself can also be used to understand whether an organisation’s reports are up-to-date and reliable.
As features such as NQL and AI continue to be leveraged, it will no longer be sufficient to rely on a handful of data assets used in specific reports. Instead, gold-standard data quality practices will be required across the entire data landscape.
Self-service functionality
With their customisable nature, modern BI platforms are providing certified data models and enabling business users to self-serve their business insights. This provides users with the confidence to interrogate the data themselves without the support of dedicated analysts. With this self-serve capability, Power BI platforms allow users to ask questions that are useful to their specific interests and deliver against key objectives.
When transitioning to a self-service model, investment in embedding technologies, data literacy and a strategy for ensuring the use of data in daily decision-making are crucial. When this is done successfully, it can accelerate the data maturity of an organisation and its understanding of the data it generates. It can also allow the users to easily access the data they need without the bottleneck caused by the workflow of an analytics team.
“The value that these BI tools provide businesses with in terms of driving values and achieving goals is immeasurably high. I’d always encourage businesses to adopt them to make decisions in a format that is easy to understand, but it is a double-edged sword. If BI isn’t done correctly, users lose trust and stop using the tools, which becomes a cost to the business that doesn’t add any value. It’s about the culture that you drive them with and how you push them to the forefront of your strategy.” – Colin Gresham, Head of BI & Analytics
Allow our business intelligence experts to help
At Dufrain, we stay ahead of the latest developments in business intelligence and data analytics, so that we can utilise these emerging technologies and gain advantage for our clients. With a greater-than-ever need for well-governed reporting solutions, we help strategic businesses leverage their data estate to produce insights that add business value. We can also enhance data engineering and modelling processes, which are fundamental to the accuracy and reliability of reporting.
Whether it’s support with BI reporting tool implementation for greater efficiency, establishing dashboards and visualisations or supporting with BI governance, we’re here to help. Speak to our BI specialists on 0800 130 3656 or contact us here.