Business intelligence is the capacity for gaining knowledge about your business and its environment and using it to make better business decisions.
The aim of gaining business intelligence is to avoid the costly risk that comes with instinct, with guessing. Instead, it endows a business with the ability to reliably predict the outcome of its decisions.
Intelligent businesses are smarter, more productive, more efficient, more cost-effective, and therefore more successful. Here are 3 reasons why.
Do more in less
Human beings are intelligent. They are creative. But they are slow.
Computers, in contrast, are not intelligent. They are not creative. But they are fast. And today, outrageously fast.
What happens when we combine the two?
We get intelligence and creativity, accelerated and scaled. For a business, this can be a breakthrough.
Though the breakthrough, historically, has always been hard to achieve since computers were also outrageously expensive. Until now, when they are remarkably cheap.
Intelligent businesses leverage the speed of computing technology to automate manual, repetitive tasks so that they can leverage the creativity of their employees to solve more complex problems.
When human beings try to do both, they waste a dramatic amount of time, and hence money.
Instead, intelligent businesses are characterized by smart decision-making whereby inefficient tasks can be delegated to a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) software, while they can focus on business-critical work.
The result (McKinsey) is enhanced efficiency, productivity, and job satisfaction.
Rich insights
Business intelligence is characterized by fact-based decision-making instead of gut-based decision-making.
Instead of guessing what, how, and whom to sell, intelligent businesses first set a well-defined goal.
Then, they collect high-quality market and customer data and analyze it to yield actionable insights.
These insights inform every decision that shapes their sales and marketing strategies, for example.
What’s incredible about such a strategy is that it can adapt to changes in the market.
Whether it is fickle customers or new technology, these changes are reflected in the new set of collected data, which when analyzed will produce new insights, which can be used to shape a new strategy.
Secondly, business intelligence enables you to create personalized customer experiences — something customers cannot get enough of.
Every time customers engage with a product or service, they generate unique data which tells something about their preferences.
The data can be used to inform marketing campaigns or sales pitches or online experiences that are tailor-made for them. And when they actually are, they generate more unique data, making the data set even more strengthened, making the following experiences even more effective!
The result is hyper-targeted sales and marketing.
Improved risk management
What do you get when you combine maximized productivity and hyper-targeted advertisements? Savings. A whole lot of it.
Maximizing productivity — or decreasing inefficiency — means getting more bang for your buck. And fact-based marketing, for example, means not taking unnecessary risks that threaten losses.
The two can combine to increase revenue dramatically, especially in the long run.
Unsurprisingly, business intelligence solutions are in ever-increasing demand. Businesses, realizing the unprecedented gains, are now rapidly adopting data-driven practices, keen to solve complex, costly problems with fact-based solutions.
In other words, smartly. Intelligently.
