The importance of business intelligence is dominating conversations among Indian business circles now more than ever before……and for good reasons too. With enterprises increasingly integrating modern technology and becoming more data-driven to compete in today’s digital age, the need to make the most of the data at their disposal to craft effective business strategies takes new levels of importance.
Most enterprises have numerous transaction systems for functions such as sales, marketing and customer service that sheds light on key internal and external metrics. However, this is insufficient to paint an accurate picture of how vital numbers such as sales or ROI can be improved, and is where the art of business intelligence becomes fundamental to data-driven decision making.
Business Intelligence in essence
According to the India Brand Equity Foundation, India’s explosive data analytics industry is expected to scale up to USD 118.7 billion by 2026, a massive boost for India’s “Techade” ambitions to lead the future of technology. One might be wondering what the role of data analytics growth is in the context of business intelligence. Data analytics and business intelligence are terms often interchangeably used by enterprises when discussing the impact of data in decision making.
While both are meant to help enhance an enterprise’s ability to make the most of its data, there is a distinct difference that must be understood. Collecting raw data to be queried and analysed in order to predict future trends, in a nutshell, describes the science of data analytics. Business Intelligence, on the other hand, is a subset of data analytics where enterprises deploy
relevant technologies to convert this data into actionable insights, which is then utilised to make more effective business decisions or lay out strategies to achieve future goals. As enterprises continue to level up on data analytics, the demand for business intelligence will also accelerate.
Business intelligence illustrates data in the form of reports and visualisations for decision makers to act on instantly and stay ahead of the curve. However, intelligence is only as good as the quality of data that is collected and analysed therefore, to get useful and actionable business intelligence, a modern data stack that includes data sources, warehouses, data pipelines and reporting tools must work effectively in tandem to extract data from source to destination, and finally, to the analytics platform.
Exploring the modern data stack
Whether data is recorded one at a time or in groups at a time, enterprises generate data all the time. The challenge here for many is that all this data is sitting in multiple sources that don’t really interact with one another. For example, customer information stored in one application while payment histories and delivery details stored in others, prevent enterprises from getting a holistic view of their customers’ experience and satisfaction.
This is where a centralised data warehouse becomes critical for long-term business viability. A data warehouse acts as a central data repository that enables data storage from disparate applications, instant access to standardised data, multi-department collaboration and querying. Most importantly, the data warehouse must align with the enterprise’s existing systems and operational modal by assessing its compatibility to its current business intelligence and data integration tools.
The crucial component between data and a data warehouse is the technology to drive raw data from multiple sources to be centralised in a destination – in this case a warehouse – called data pipelines. Also known as data connectors, data pipelines help manage the transfer and
normalisation of data into a warehouse to conduct analysis. It also safeguards data quality which is crucial for reliable business intelligence, and has the capabilities to route data from a warehouse to customer processing systems.
Putting business intelligence to practise
The last piece of the modern data stack puzzle is integrating a reporting platform to generate the types of resources required. While businesses intelligence tools generally vary in abilities based on use cases, a reporting platform can fundamentally support business intelligence in accessing data and churning out intelligence in the form of reports to provide static views of relevant data combined from many sources, visualisations such as graphs and charts for more demonstrative viewing especially for trends, sales figures, ROI, etc., and customisable dashboards that updates in real-time or near real-time.
As exciting as business intelligence sounds, keep in mind that it’s not intended to make decisions for you. It’s meant to be backward looking, designed to help decision makers assess trends and performance of the past and provide them with important data to make strategic decisions for the future. It ultimately comes down to when and how expert and experienced decision makers decide to use the information in line with their goals and priorities.
(The author is Mr. Vikram Labhe, Vice President & Managing Director, Fivetran India and the views expressed in this article are his own)
