Is Business Intelligence the Future?

Data-driven solutions are considered to be the backbone of a predictable future.

Top Business Intelligence (BI) software  combines the entire data coming from the infrastructure of a company, and it then makes use of different strategies or methodologies along with technological innovations to allow access to critical insights for technical and non-technical users alike. 

Defining business intelligence gets harder each day with businesses developing smart systems that are able to provide actionable insights with extremely accurate answers for the subject matter experts to develop strategies for the continued growth of the company.

From the start of the early 2000s, as companies started shifting to cloud-based infrastructure it resulted in businesses owning larger amounts of data than ever before.

Business analytics came into play with companies having large amounts of historical data combined with technological innovations in the form of smart systems with analytical systems that we're able to decrease time to insights where business analysts had to previously manually go through the past trends to see the historical significance of the data this could now be done with these systems that could be third party systems providing actionable insights that the business leaders could then work on immediately.

The difference between a business analyst and business analytics then is that an analyst is a person who measures and studies metrics while analytics refers to the systems and tools available for in-depth reporting and business intelligence. 

At the end of the day, the human brain only has limited computing powers whereas computers will always be able to actualize the importance of the raw data that is being sourced nowadays by compartmentalizing and arranging it much faster than a human brain. 

Business Intelligence combines all of the different strategies or methodologies a business is using for it’s data analytics along with technological innovations.

As a result business intelligence when implemented properly should be able to provide a concise and clear pathway with deeper insights into past trends, smart systems should be able to get accurate answers for the current insights for decision making, allowing sharing with relevant subject matter experts or set of users that are most relevant for access to those insights.

With artificial intelligence and power BI now being effectively used across all industries, it seems that business intelligence is indeed the future for businesses that want to stay domain experts. This allows for actually realizing predictive insights that can be used to enhance user experience and the return on investment.

However, this is a constantly evolving process and businesses need to make sure that they are constantly providing the necessary tweaks to their business intelligence plan so that the focus stays on improving business processes by utilizing the available and future data the business is able to spot the business intelligence trends most significant for their industry.

Business Intelligence trends in the coming years will define how technology will shape the field for how businesses interact with their data. With machine learning becoming an essential business intelligence trend, companies that are able to implement it properly can have their systems diagnose issues in the product or service without the customer ever having to complain or report for it, creating a smooth user experience where answers to users are readily available.

Natural language processing is being implemented on a large scale in the customer service niche using technology to enhance accessibility for business intelligence on the customer’s end. This can also be used for inter-departmental communication or decreasing production time by allowing the workers to communicate with the system using direct audio commands or instructions. This would directly increase collaboration between the workers and allow accessibility of insights to nontechnical users as well.

With the global chip shortage at hand, newer ways need to be developed to store and retrieve data that requires less computing power allowing for this immeasurable data to be correctly quantified and more data points to be created that might not be existential for us yet. Microsoft’s Power BI has created a new avenue for such tools to be developed by other competitors that allow for industry-wise or enterprise operation wise be segmented allowing for multiple companies to be using the same standard practices on the same platform and eventually allowing the industry to innovate once all of that competitor data is on the same platform.

Companies should look for avenues where feedback can be shared with business users by giving them actionable insights throughout their period of work and monitoring improvements using business intelligence tools.

In the future it seems that business intelligence will grow in the following different directions majorly:

Where data driven decisions are used for the management of employees, customers, raw materials, and production. And managers would end up overseeing the execution of the tasks then making decisions on their gut feelings or experiences, they will be making decisions on data driven results using predictive insights coming from business intelligence tools that are defined on the basis of trends in business intelligence.

IDC FutureScape predicts that "By 2026, B2B companies will use AI interactions and analytics technology to deliver deeply personalized journey engagement, eliminating 40% of marketing and sales human touch points."

True to their prediction we can see a rising number of digital initiatives where cognitive artificial intelligence capabilities, despite being in their initial stages, are performing startlingly well in just the past year alone.

Smart systems are now being effectively created. Integrating artificial intelligence with cloud storage has allowed a large number of smaller businesses to identify essential business intelligence trends and outperform their large scale competitors without having to hire separate business intelligence analysts.

Yet, to be able to provide access to expert and accurate answers which in turn directly enhances the user experience. This seems to be forcing enterprise systems to revamp themselves where we can see multiple different approaches coming out of it.

We can look at the emergence of self service business intelligence where the relevant employee base directly receiving and being impacted by the business intelligence workflow will increasingly grow. This will allow a bigger collaborative force to work together simultaneously while allowing people to make their own data driven decisions without requiring continuous supervision and integrations with third party systems if required.

With remote work becoming a norm, it will allow firms to focus on the data that actually matters for them. Facial recognition systems have also reached a high level of dexterity after having access to larger than ever sample sets giving rise to a wide range of future probabilities .