Imagine for a moment
Imagine that your organization is effectively using business intelligence (BI) and analytics that provide everything you need to make better decisions and improve operational efficiency. Imagine users with their fingers on the pulse of markets, customers, channels and operations at all times. And imagine that your programs, plans, services and products are being designed with full and timely insight into all the factors — past, present and future — critical to success. What would it take to make that happen?
What businesses need from BI and analytics is a full picture. And that is why it is important to understand that, for now and in the future, BI and analytics should help you not only describe and diagnose your past and current performance, but also predict future performance. When your business can do all three, you have a better idea of what your business needs to do to stay competitive. You have reports that show you where you have been, scorecards and real-time monitoring that show what is happening now and predictive analytics to show where your business is headed.
In a fast-paced, constantly shifting marketplace, business success requires being able to use data to:
- Identify market trends ahead of the competition
- Understand customer behavior
- Tackle and solve operational inefficiency
- Make sound business decisions with confidence
- Overcome bad decisions that seem obvious in hindsight
- Make sense of the explosion of data and data sources that are currently clouding the business horizon
Therefore, supplying historical information is just the start of a BI and analytics program. A new focus is moving BI and analytics forward. A combination of self service and managed data analysis capabilities is helping users become more efficient and effective when decisions need to be made. Not only does this new focus include reporting, dashboards and analysis for smarter business decisions, but also performance management to drive profitable growth and predictive analytics to optimize business outcomes. In short, it is forward-thinking BI.
Predictive analytics takes BI to a new level
With this kind of BI, businesses can tap into all types of information. People in virtually all roles can explore and interact with information and share their insights with others. Decisions, whether they are made by individuals or embedded in automated systems, are optimized with insights derived from analytics that range from historical reporting to real-time analysis to predictive modeling. The result is a panoramic view of your business that strikes the right balance of awareness and confidence to improve business outcomes.
Predictive analytics gives you the glimpse of the future that is needed for a more complete picture of your business. It can help you determine what customers want. You can use it to maximize operational efficiency. It helps you prepare for probable future conditions by flagging potential issues, variances and inconsistencies and then identifying trends in the data that can shed light on them. It shows you potential new sources of revenue, helps you find customer segments you might be missing and shows you other opportunities for growth.
The benefits of a forward view of your business
Who benefits from forward-thinking BI? Your entire company. When you use BI to its full potential, your company can:
- Beat the competition. Transform your business from a reactive operation to a proactive market leader by setting and staying ahead of trends with integrated analysis of text, web and survey data.
- Reinforce accuracy and confidence in decisions. Move beyond simply understanding past performance by validating business intuition and existing practices and policies with a view into what is likely to happen next.
- Enrich the data discovery experience. Understand your data better by discovering patterns and trends in your structured and unstructured data.
- More specifically, the different roles in your organization benefit as follows:
- Executives can use predictive intelligence in decisions made at all levels of the organization — strategic, operational and tactical.
- Business managers can recognize which factors are influencing outcomes and the relationships therein to pinpoint issues and drive improvements.
- Business analysts can easily attain a very detailed understanding of the relationships hidden in all your data (numerical and text). They can generate focused predictive intelligence that can improve decision outcomes for measureable ROI.
- Analytics professionals can use structured and unstructured data to determine relationships and construct models to predict outcomes and future events.
- System managers can take advantage of non-intrusive integration with operational systems and flexible deployment.
And, underpinning all of these advantages is the fact that users have a more complete perspective of your business and can view descriptive, diagnostic and predictive information.
Procuring this solution as a managed service has even more advantages. Leave the details to the experts. You benefit from industry best practices and best of breed solutions, for a low monthly fee. Your company’s most valuable information and key insights are presented to you in a concise, easy to understand format and you will have help every step of the way.
If you don’t know where to start, or would like to understand how to use business analytics in a way that will bring measurable success to your operations, schedule a consultation with the experts at Flagship Solutions Group.
Read our white paper: Infrastructure + Analytics = Infralytics™, Essential Insights, Real-time
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