For years, Business Intelligence (BI) has been the industry standard for helping leadership gain visibility into business operations and make data-driven decisions. Many companies saw the Analysis of their data so vital to their brand that they created roles for ‘Business Intelligence Experts’ to vet the information and prepare it into easily understandable packages.
While the venture into BI wasn’t in vain, it is now at a nexus of change. At this year’s Gartner Business Intelligence and Analytics Summit , Frank Buytendijk said, in short, that ‘BI is dead.’
So what’s next? As the volume and complexity of data continues to grow, business owners must focus on how to extend that data across multiple departments and business functions, from the corner office to the remoter workers.
“Traditionally, BI has consisted of places to store your data, the plumbing to connect your data sources, ways to visualize and report on your data, the people who analyze the data and so on,” explains Nadim Hossain, BrightFunnel CEO. “ Typically each layer is offered by a different vendor, and requires heavy IT support. This 25 + year-old category is now being disrupted by cloud-based, predictive analytics companies that integrate every layer of the BI stack into a single platform.”
Analytics across an organization.
More targeted marketing was one of the biggest contributions enterprises welcomed when big data first hit. Big data allowed brands to create elaborate, yet personalized campaigns that evolved to become increasingly effective as salesmen and marketers learned how to actually use all of the data they now had access to. But now, big data has become so broad and complex it has outgrown its ability to provide tangible results without the translation of an IT department.
“If your brand is trying to accelerate revenue, it’s important for all departments to leverage data and analytics to take action,” explains Hossain. “Often, there is a misalignment that occurs due to lack of accurate , shared knowledge. Marketing needs to know which campaigns are effective so they can expand those, and scrap the ones that aren’t working. Salespeople need to be equipped with maximum intelligence on their target accounts, and fully benefit from the historical data on each account.
