The age of BI

We are living in a digital world; everyday life gets more and more dependent on our decisions that are based on digital information. We read the news on the Internet, check the weather forecast on a screen, and we also shop online.

As our everyday decisions are influenced and aided by the technology surrounding us, there is an increasing amount of data that has an impact on our behaviour as well. This also results in an increasing urge to filter this huge volume of data and pick out the needed, useful information. New challenges, for example the excessive amount of information available or dynamic surroundings all make sound decision-making more difficult for us.

According to an article published in the journal ‘Science’, humanity broadcasts an amount of data every day that is equivalent to distributing 174 newspapers’ worth of information to each inhabitant on Earth. Based on researchers’ estimates, 295 exabytes of data were generated between 2002 and 2007. If we burned this much data on CDs, the tower built of said CDs would be so high as to reach the Moon. (Source: Kreatív) 

Thus, it can be stated that business intelligence (BI) is the key to productive data analysis. It helps to make decision-making faster and more efficient for corporate and business managers, as well as other end-users.  Since BI includes all tools, applications and methods that can help organisations gather valuable information from internal and external sources, they can perform analyses, and through queries, they can share the analytics with corporate executives and operative employees.

Ultimately, BI systems – by optimising internal business processes – prevent us from getting lost in the enormous flow of data and aid us in keeping track of current trends in the market, solving the problems we face and eventually, gaining a competitive edge over competitors. 

Online Marketing tipps

Companies need to maintain a constant web appearance if they want to keep up with competition. Leading businesses must keep their website up-to-date and they need to keep continuous contact with their consumers. In the following we offer you advice about what makes your online service effective and successful.  

It is important to determine your target consumers and obtain information about their concerns and requirements.  After the initial information gathering and data evaluation, you develop solutions for the customers and communicate these solutions and the benefit of their use on your website and blog. Based on the information they receive, your clients can decide to order your services. Your texts and messages should be straightforward and clear.

Creating mailing lists is an essential part of marketing strategies. For startup companies which do not have registered consumers yet, I wouldn’t recommend buying existing lists because they don’t always bring success and we don’t know how they were compiled.  Be patient, and start saving addresses from your own websites. An effective method could be registering consumers for the newsletters or asking for the e-mail address when services are used. It is important to send newsletters to registered users to keep their interest in you alive.

You need to find a good balance in sharing information about your business on social networks and platforms. You definitely need to communicate about yourself, but not too much or too little. One of the best ways to change temporary consumers to permanent ones is to give them convincing content. Your recommendations must be convincing enough to persuade users to buy your offer or make them share your posts in their social circles. You can borrow ideas from companies that are successful in the same field and understand how they communicate and which topics they focus on. We can help you in this process with our Business Monitor service which provides the tools for you to get information about your competitors and trends.  The Business Monitor completes searches with given keywords among thousands of websites on national and international levels. It uses only trustworthy sources without unnecessary advertisements.

You will notice you serve your clients and consumers with convincing recommendations: they will come back to you and use your services in the long run.

Business Intelligence – look into the future

In the business world, it is essential to gain advantage over competitors. In order to have the edge over our rivals, we need well-thought-out and carefully planned decisions.  Data-analysis, as a method, is getting more and more widespread in decision-making, which means that there is a well-coordinated work within the whole enterprise using information and communication technologies and introducing more complex business solutions.  

The Gartner market research company predicts that a new generation of business intelligence will appear. To justify this idea, they mentioned that there is a growing demand for exploring connections among data.

According to the study of Tableau Software, the most important trends of 2015 in business intelligence are the following:

Data Governance in transition:

In the world of self-service analytics, we cannot simply lock up data or forbid data processing. Questions we have to ask are whether the data used in business planning and decision making are up-to-date; how the different departments coordinate; and what the legal requirements of security questions are.

Key questions for determining data-using strategies:

team: its task is to review the existing data, then to create an effective self-service system. It is about the coordinated work of computer engineers and managers, since it is necessary to organize the different needs into one system in order to create a successful and holistic structure. In addition, the process is suitable for discovering new sources.

data quality: the formed system has to be able to direct users towards up-to-date, accurate shared data

data security: classifying data and ranking access levels can help to preserve the protection of delicate information   

report: preparing straightforward guidelines which explain how to access data

Social intelligence:

For businesses, it is crucial to comprehensively analyze the data of social networks, because information gained from this analysis can show the tendencies and courses of target audience’s interest. Organizations are in possession of up-to-date information about what their customers talk about; when a product or topic gets popular. Feedbacks, posts, reactions (all of which are recorded) related to products and campaigns create a vast data volume whose study leads us to understand current trends and behaviors.

Simple, clear-cut usage:

Due to applied innovation in the past decade, the process of data-storage, usage and supervision has become obscure. Thus, in the future, simple user interface will become widespread and one of its embodiments is data visualization. This method will help to carry out self-service analyses, to share, to facilitate access to operational, planning and financial information. If we have the necessary information, it can increase the operational effectiveness.

Widely used cloud analysis:

While previously, data usage was limited to cloud-based data, in the past years, analysis of information stored on storage devices has appeared. From this year on, enterprises will choose this cloud-based access, only if they can specifically employ it in their business.

Spread of interactive data:

By means of technology, information is interactive enough to motivate us to have a discussion and to talk about something in a meaningful way. Information analysis enables the invention of new perspectives and aspects for the audience.

Spread of visual information:

Online news-services recognized that visuality is gaining more and more importance; therefore, the era of data diagrams and graphs is on the rise. Tables and graphs that visualize connections help us understand information better.

Technical devices in the pocket:

Mobile analytics tools are especially suitable for ensuring access to information even if we are not sitting beside our desks.  Analytics provide those who are out of office with fast and live data.

 

These forecasts also show how important it is to use new and modern devices and systems, which we have to take into consideration if we do not wish to lag behind our competitors.