Business intelligence with Catalyst: what is it and why is it important?
The business intelligence market is enormous. In fact, as of 2023, the global business intelligence market is worth around $29.4 billion according to Data Prot statistics. While this statistic does not show why it is so important, it does show that it is incredibly important to a huge number of different industries and businesses.
In this article, we will help you to better understand what exactly business intelligence is and why it is so important to several different organisations and industries.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is software that helps to combine predictive analytics, business analytics, data visualisation, data mining, data tools and integration to help businesses and organisations make better informed data-driven decisions. This therefore means that you can use raw data to help improve business operations, and business performance and to gain a competitive advantage over your competitors.
The overall goal of these business intelligence tools and business intelligence software is to help drive better business decision-making. These data-driven decisions will then allow organisations to improve their business data, business processes and overall efficiency to help increase the overall performance of the business.
While this is a very modern definition of business intelligence solutions, it is important to note that business intelligence has been around for decades and has a very rich history. It traditionally started as a way for businesses to share information across different organisations.
How Business Intelligence Works
Business intelligence platforms more often than not rely on the information given to them via data warehouses. The job of a data warehouse is to pull in multiple different data sources from different data sets into a single data management system to support business analytics and reporting. Business intelligence software will then present the findings and reports to the user.
Once the data is processed and stored within the data warehouses, decision-makers can then access the data to perform data analysis that will help to answer different business questions.
These reports will then allow business users, data analysts and organisations to make informed business decisions and forecast the findings. Bi platforms and bi tools will allow the decision makers within the business to get all of the information that they need to make decisions that will benefit the business performance, business processes and more.
Benefits Of Business Intelligence
Increased Efficiency – Well-designed BI platform dashboards will give you all of the most important real-time key performance indicators and insights immediately, helping you be able to work far quicker. Having easy access to such important insights will make decision-making far more efficient. In fact, according to data by Data Prot, Businesses using business intelligence are 5 times more likely to reach faster decisions than those that do not.
Manually compiling data together is both very time-consuming and expensive, BI tools allow you to find all historical data and real-time raw data that you need in an instant. This increased efficiency of decision-making can help to give you an upper hand and competitive advantage over your competitors.
Better Decisions – Having such important and relevant data accessible in an instant will have a huge benefit on the quality of the decision-making within an organisation. Effective dashboards and immediate access to data analytics allow decision-makers and business intelligence analysts to make much more informed and data-driven decisions. As an example, a business could notice a shortage in its supply chain before it happens and could then take all the necessary steps to fully prevent this from happening.
More Competitive – Using insights and data that has been derived from BI tools, businesses can closely monitor the performance of their competitors as well as market trends to identify new opportunities and market gaps. This, along with its ability to improve the efficiency of decisions, allows businesses to exploit new opportunities before their competition. This gives the business an incredible competitive advantage that can result in very good business.
Enhanced Strategic Performance – Bi data tools allow you to identify future trends as they are just beginning to develop. Catching these trends early and being able to quickly adapt and take advantage of them puts your business in a very good place to be able to beat your competitors to the mark. Business intelligence also provides much more accurate data than an individual employee can bring in, meaning that you can trust the trends that BI data tools are highlighting.
Establish Benchmarking – Business intelligence tools do not only allow businesses to compare their performance to their competitors, but they also allow you to compare your current performance to your historical data. This can therefore allow them to establish benchmarks and continue to compare as they move forward. This can allow them to see where they have improved and where they may still need to improve which can once again help to make more decisive and informed decisions.
Why Is Business Intelligence So Important To So Many Businesses?
Business intelligence plays a huge role in the operations of a huge number of businesses. That is because it is a tool that can help organisations to better understand the raw data that they store and use it in a much more effective and efficient way that can help to improve the overall running of the business.
Businesses that actively use business intelligence for decision-making data metrics are able to make much more informed decisions based on the extremely detailed data dashboards that they have easy access to. This data allows businesses to make decisions on vital business operations, potential supply chain problems, market trends, pricing, performance metrics and so much more that would take a huge amount of time, money and resources without business intelligence.
It is clear why so many businesses love business intelligence and use it as their main data source. The benefits that it provides a business with are incredibly important and can play a huge part in the success and growth of an organisation. In summary, business intelligence is so important as it can immediately provide businesses with data reports and metrics that can help the overall smooth running and performance of a business.
Data Consultancy Services At Catalyst BI
Here at Catalyst Bi, we offer extremely effective data management solutions and consultants that can help your organisation source, ingest, store and transform proprietary data for effective business intelligence. Our data management consultants will help you to better understand and utilise your data to support and grow business operations and business performance.
Contact our expert team of highly experienced consultants and get your business intelligence journey started today.
