Using Business Intelligence to Leverage Your Data [Free Webinar]
SmartCompliance is putting on a webinar, hosted by CEO, James Benham, where he will talk about Business Intelligence (BI) and how you can leverage it for your business’ data. Before joining the webinar, take a minute to look over this article to learn the fundamentals of BI.
Here, we will mention a few key secrets you will want to know before joining the webinar.
At its core, business intelligence has four functions. Let us take a look:
- Ingest one or more data sets.
- Transform the datasets into customizable data.
- Create widgets and dashboards to visualize the data.
- Give users access to the data, widgets, and dashboards.
Now that we understand the functions of BI, keep reading to learn what business intelligence is, how to understand dashboards, and how to set BI goals.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence is the use of software or other services to take data and transform it into information that an organization can use to optimize its business goals, strategies, and decisions.
BI also includes the tools used to gather and transform this data. Data is often presented as reports, dashboards, summaries, or charts and graphs to provide users with the information.
Having strong Business Intelligence means you have a complete overview of your business’ data and you use it to make changes, find and remove inefficiencies, and adapt to changes in the market or supply.
Now let us examine the importance of dashboards, what they are used for, and how you can set up goals to get the most out of your BI.
Understanding BI Dashboards
One of the most important aspects of BI is the ability to use dashboards to generate reports. According to CIO, “dashboards are hosted software applications that automatically pull together available data into charts and graphs that give a sense of the immediate state of the company.”
Without dashboards, it would be impossible to understand all the data gathered through BI. The dashboards used in business intelligence reports give people the ability to investigate the most important data and understand what is going on.
Some information that can be gathered from BI dashboards to help businesses make better decisions include:
- Ideas to increase profits
- Customer behaviors
- Competitor data
- Performance tracking
- Ways to optimize operations
- Success predictions
- Market trends
- Issues and problems
This is not an all-inclusive list, but these are important places to start.
The information gathered on BI dashboards does not tell businesses what to do or what will happen if they choose a certain course of action. BI dashboards streamline the process of gathering the data needed to make business decisions.
Knowing how to set BI goals is just as important as the ability to understand BI data. Let us look at where to start when setting BI goals.
How to Set BI Goals
Gathering BI data is useless unless your business can use this data to set business strategies and goals. Some important places to look for improvement are past reports, gaps in reporting, KPIs, historical data, and clients.
Ask yourself some of these questions to help set goals:
- What do we need and what are we missing?
- What do we look at to define success?
- What have leaders asked for in the past that took effort to find and formulate?
- Who are your internal and external clients?
Answering these questions will set you on the right path to using your BI data.
Want to Learn More About Business Intelligence?
Whether you already use BI or if you are just starting to look into software options, SmartCompliance’s webinar: Using Business Intelligence to Leverage Your Data, is going to give you insightful information to improve your BI data.
Sign up and join us on December 3, 2020, at 1 PM CT to learn more about business intelligence and how you can use it to leverage your data.
