4 Questions to Answer to Determine if You Need Business Intelligence

90% of the world's data has been generated in the past two years (IBM). Now, with the advent of the Internet of Things, the amount of data captured is only growing larger and larger.

Gone are the days when businesses could run a couple of static, monthly Excel reports and declare that they make "data driven decisions." For the first time ever, every company, not just Fortune 500s, is realizing that they need better ways to analyze massive amounts of data coming from several complex data sources in order to make real-time, data driven decisions.

No matter if you're in marketing, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, or finance, every organization is sitting on a gold mine of data.

The question is, how do you use this data to increase competitive advantage, reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve both your employees' and your customers' satisfaction?

What used to be an impossible task has been made simple with business intelligence. Companies that are inundated with data are turning to business intelligence solutions to transform their raw data into meaningful insights.

For years, business intelligence was an expensive solution that could only be utilized by Fortune 500s with deep pockets. However, thanks to huge advancements in BI technologies (such as In-Chip as opposed to In-Memory), flexible deployment, and customized licensing options, every organization can take advantage of business intelligence.

The power of business intelligence is that it increases your ability to identify trends and issues, uncover new insights, and fine-tune operations to meet business goals.

There are four questions to answer to determine if your company needs a business intelligence solution.

Question 1: Do you have more data today than a year ago?

As I discussed in "Why 'Big Data' Matters More Now Than Ever," it's easier than ever to collect data; every click on ad, every opened email, every shipped item -- it's all added to your stockpile of data.

For years, companies used Excel to analyze all of this data. However, Excel quickly becomes sluggish with all of this growing data. Even if you have perfectly cleaned and managed your data sets, before long, your data will exceed Excel's capacity.

Getting a unified, accurate view of the bigger picture using a BI tool that can scale to terabytes of data will give you a coherent analysis of any amount of data much faster than Excel ever could.

Question 2: Do you have more data sources today than a year ago?

In today’s business environment, it is imperative that you mash-up all of your data coming from many different sources into a single coherent location.

If you’re still running separate marketing, sales, financial, and HR reports, you're not only working too hard, but you're missing out on valuable, cross data correlations.

Once you start using a BI tool to successfully work with multiple sources of data, you’ll find out how easy it is to add additional data sources to the mix, and that there’s no end to the insightful mash ups you can gain.

Question 3: Do you want to move IT functions closer to the front-end business users to increase efficiencies?

Without a BI solution, the common reporting process looks like this:

Marketing executive requests a report from a marketing analyst on last month's marketing campaign. The analyst responsible for building this report has to take time away from their tasks to build this. Not only that, but if your IT department controls all your data, then the marketing analyst has to reach out to IT to create that report. This can take hours, days, or even weeks. IT then sends the report back to the analyst. The analyst cleans the report, adds some pretty visuals, and sends it back to the executive. By this time though, the data is stale and the executive has moved on.

Furthermore, because of the complexity of these reports, creating reports without a BI software often requires someone with a technical background and therefore forces non-technical users to be reliant on IT.

Question 4: Do you want to move IT functions closer to the front-end business users to make better, faster data driven decisions?

When you’re constantly having to request that your IT department tweak and edit reports, it can lead to a bottleneck with long delays in getting the work done. This is a clear sign that it’s time to bring the data to the people who actually benefit from analyzing data to meet business goals – the business users.

There is a big trend in data analytics right now called self-service analytics. Any solid BI tool with a clean, intuitive UI will allow business users to build their own reports as well as have the flexibility to add or tweak any BI dashboard.

So, now what?

It is my belief that every organization needs a business intelligence solution to help them make a shift from making decisions based on intuition to making decisions based on data.

If you said yes to just one of the four questions above, it's clear that you need a business intelligence solution.

If you said yes to all four of these questions, it's clear that you need Sisense.