The new standard in Business Intelligence Services

Business intelligence refers to the strategies and practices that organizations implement to gather, analyze, and present data. Through business intelligence, they can obtain key insights and make informed business decisions by evaluating and understanding market trends, patterns, and opportunities.

Businesses mainly require business intelligence for the following reasons:

• Data-driven decision-making: Accessing accurate, relevant, and timely data to make appropriate decisions based on insights and evidence, instead of guesswork.

• Better efficiency: Optimizing business operations for better performance by identifying inefficiencies, errors, and improvement areas.

• Better customer insights: Analyzing customer behavior, buying patterns, and preferences to tailor services and products for meeting customer needs.

• Competitive advantage: Identifying emerging trends, customer preferences, and business opportunities within the marketplace to make strategic decisions and gain a massive competitive advantage.

• Forecasting: Using BI techniques and tools to forecast future business trends, anticipate customer demand, and make accurate predictions to strategize effectively, mitigate risks, and capture opportunities timely.

Some of the most common business intelligence tools used today are: Tableau, Power BI, Qlik Sense and QlikView, MicroStrategy, Looker, IBM Cognos, SAP BusinessObjects, Pentaho, Apache Hadoop, Apache Spark, Python, and R.

Business intelligence solutions obtain information primarily from data warehouses. These warehouses aggregate data from various sources into a single system for business reporting and analytics. A BI system queries the warehouse and shows the results to the end user via reports, maps, and charts.

There are a few key factors that determine if a BI solution is right for your business. These include:

• Type of tools: In recent years, many enterprises have been preferring cloud-based BI solutions as these applications are stored on a host server and accessed online. This helps avert IT disasters, office dependencies, and the need for extra IT infrastructure. However, some businesses are extra cautious and want BI tools to run on their own servers and PCs, and hence, choose on-premise solutions.

• Scalability: Business scale and growth are vital considerations. For instance, a lightweight BI solution with basic features can be more affordable and best-suited to SMEs with smaller data volumes, but may not be ideal for larger enterprises.

• Complexity: A simple BI solution with fewer options and features may be easier to teach new users, and more cost-efficient. However, if your business is bigger, needs a BI solution with extra features, and has a user base with some expertise in general, a larger and more complex BI tool would be a better choice.

• Integration capabilities: A BI tool is the most useful when it can seamlessly integrate with various systems and databases currently in use at your organization, and those that may be incorporated in the future. Hence, you must select a solution that is versatile in its integration capabilities, so that it offers better insights by accessing as much data as it can.

• Use cases: Ultimately, selecting a BI solution will depend on what your business needs it for. Hence, a thorough assessment of the use case is necessary when choosing a BI solution, as different business priorities will require different BI features.

Turing offers personalized, end-to-end, expert business intelligence services that cater to specific requirements. With over 125 years of combined experience building world-class tech solutions, we provide holistic solutions to address whatever BI needs you may have, including business intelligence consulting, data warehousing, BI maintenance, and other business intelligence solutions.