How Online Business Intelligence Software can Benefit your Organization – Part One

Once an employee reaches the middle management level, you can be fairly sure that the person knows the basics well and understands the theory of the subject. Putting that into practice is not so easy, though. While theory comes out of books and seems to hold good for a variety of circumstances, in practice, not much apart from the basic idea is really useful.

To make intelligent decisions, managers need to know more than the theory. They need to know the business, its operations, the industry, the current and future landscape of the market, the needs of the customers, etc. All this information in the form of data will already be available in some form or the other but this data comes from disparate sources and different functional units and it can take a lot of time to process it and come up with actionable conclusions.

This is where online business intelligence software comes in. BI helps organizations process this raw data into a reliable and accurate outlook of the business and helps managers and executives take decisions based on the insights they gain. In this post, we’ll look at the various ways business intelligence software can benefit your organization.

Democratization of expertise & data: This is one of the biggest benefits of online business intelligence software. In the earlier days, functional heads were dependent on accountants and IT heads for number-crunching as they lacked the relevant skills required for the job. However, this software is intuitive and easy-to-use, meaning that anyone can use it to become an instant expert.

Same is the case with data. In earlier days, functions worked in their own silos with data related to one function staying within that function. Apart from that, users who needed access to data sometimes never got it due to institutional constraints and bureaucracy. Online BI software breaks down these barriers and makes information available to everyone who needs it.

We’ll see other benefits in the next part of this post.