Small businesses come across big opportunities, but with the huge prospects come a large swath of difficulties and substantial rivalry. It wasn’t a total surprise when statistics from Statistic Brain revealed that more than 50 percent of new businesses in the United States failed within four years. There are several issues that can contribute to the success or failure of a startup, and one of the most prominent technologies that is becoming increasingly important for businesses of all sizes is business intelligence (BI). The present startup scenario has access to a wide array of tools that offer significant and predictive data analyses to settle on well-informed decisions.
The issue, obviously, is whether startup entrepreneurs are prepared to explore the benefits of the accessible tools. In the event that entrepreneurs wish to be successful in 2020 and beyond, they need to make business intelligence a top priority now.
Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-driven process that uses programming tools and services to analyze data and transform it into significant insights that spur a company's key and strategic business decisions. BI includes a wide range of tools, methodologies, and applications, that accesses datasets from internal and external sources and analyzes it, presents analytical findings in reports, graphs, summaries, data visualizations, charts, dashboards, and maps to provide users with in-depth insights about the current business scenario.
The term business intelligence also alludes to a range of tools that give brisk, simple-to-process access to insights about a company’s current state, on the basis of the available datasets. Mentioned below are few of the reasons why business intelligence should be the top priority of organizations of all sizes:
Improving Time-Management
Several startup entrepreneurs realize that there is crucial information contained inside their company data, however, they think that they can't manage the additional cost of owning a software tool. They make the mistake of assuming that they already have enough resources to look through the information on their own to find actionable insights. Disappointingly, these sincere goals barely translate into actions. According to a statement made by Anne-Claire Herve in an article for Innovation Enterprise, 56 percent of SMEs report that they look through their data “rarely or not very often.” Additionally, polls report that 3 percent have never checked their data at all. When diving into the reasons for this misuse, an entire 33 percent of those reviewed said that they didn't take a look at their information because they were too occupied with other tasks.
From advertising your product or service to picking up financing, there are already numerous responsibilities pulling you in various ways. Working on minuscule datasets can be unnecessarily tedious, keeping you from performing other significant tasks. But a BI tool can make your task easier by filtering through the data, which will leave you with the option of working more effectively so that nothing gets ignored.
Smart Decision-Making with In-Depth Knowledge
BI works far beyond simply detailing the information. These tools effectively search for connections between different datasets to assist you in finding the purposes for different patterns and events. Along with offering significant insights, these tools additionally offer prescriptive and predictive analytics to give solutions that you can use to improve business operations. With data insights around the corner, you can settle on well-informed decisions that are bound to have effective results.
Obviously, quality decision-making relies upon asking the right questions of your analytics tools. Jim Rich, a global VP of sales for Sisense, said, "Most organizations have similar KPIs: increased deals, expansion into growth markets, improved operational proficiency, etc. The thing is, everyone's searching for a similar kind of stuff. Companies that stand out of this crowd are those that change and pivot their KPIs on the basis of a blend of macroeconomics, what's going on in their industry, and distinguishing new KPIs that set them apart from the competition."
All things considered, you don't simply need to confine your use of BI to sales. Predictive analytics can assist you with determining which blog points will attract the most readers to your webpage. Machine learning trains these tools to consistently learn as they gain new data and as you put forth new questions.
You Are Not the Only One Using BI
BI tools’ capacity to help you save time and settle on more intelligent decisions as you guide your startup is surely fascinating. Be that as it may, what is even more important for your business entrepreneurs is to realize that their opposition is increasingly starting to use these tools.
Large-scale businesses are already leading the way in BI adoption. For instance, as wired reports, video streaming service Netflix uses BI and AI tools to process massive amounts of information, which is liable for 80 or more percent of the content viewers decide to watch. Amazon uses BI tools in a quite impressive manner. As Jennifer Wills states in an article for Investopedia, "Amazon's licensed predictive delivery model uses big data for predicting the items you are probably going to buy, when you may purchase them, and where you may need the items."
BI tools are becoming progressively accessible to startup businesses. If your business isn’t using these tools to better access your data, you can be certain that your rivals will use them to pick up the advantage.
Your startup's ability to use BI tools could give the insights you need to attract customers and improve your net revenues. Overlooking the insights hidden in your organization's data could make you miss out on key opportunities and even put you at a more serious risk of losing money. Putting resources into quality BI tools won't simply help you save time - it could eventually have a significant impact on your company’s future.