5 Reasons Every Business Needs BI

I believe that every business needs to implement Business Intelligence in one form or another and, in this article, I’m going to give you 5 good reasons why.

1. Make smarter business decisions

Let’s start off with the whole raison d’être of BI, to help you gain insights from your data to make smarter business decisions. That’s right, those charts and graphs in dashboards aren’t just pretty images, they’re actually giving you a visual representation of how your business is performing. And the fact that it’s visual means that it’s easier and faster to read. There’s no burying your head in and trying to make sense of a whole bunch of numbers.

To demonstrate just how beneficial it is to visualise your data, here’s a test I did in a previous video that illustrates this point perfectly.

In a second (below) you’ll see a table containing 12 different values, one for each month of the year and you’ve got 3 SECONDS ONLY to tell me which is the highest value. Ready? No cheating! Three…two…one…

So, which month has the highest value? If you did, in fact, manage to spot the highest value within just 3 seconds then well done! Not many people do.

Now, I’m going to show you the same values but this time in a column chart and, again, you’ve got 3 SECONDS ONLY to see if you can spot the highest. Ready? Three…two…one…

I’m guessing you probably did much better that time. I’ve put both side by side below. You can see that, with the column chart, very quickly you can not only spot the highest value but also the lowest and even the distribution of values over the 12 months.

So, as you can see, visualising your data makes it much easier to read and understand. To spot trends and see where things are going well and where they might need improvement. Helping you to take action and make smarter decisions. On to reason number 2.

2. Budget no longer an issue

If you run a small business, especially in times like these, you might think that implementing BI for your business would come at great cost and therefore be, perhaps, a luxury that isn’t worth the investment.

Well, the first thing to say to that would be that the insights gained from your data that help you make these smarter business decisions are going to help you either increase your revenue by improving performance or reduce costs by spotting areas where money might be saved through streamlining, making your business more efficient.

So, if you do invest in onboarding a BI tool, the idea is that it should pay for itself many times over.

And my second response would be that there are BI tools on the market today that cost very little or that are even free to use, like Google Data Studio. So the budget question is really no longer an issue.

Now, of course, everything will depend on the data you have and the services you use but, generally speaking, you can go pretty far and at least get started with little or no upfront investment.

3. Data is available and accessible

As soon as you say the word data to some people, their eyes tend to glaze over. It’s not the most exciting thing (at least to most normal people) to think about and might seem complicated and abstract.

But, even if you’re just manually entering sales figures into an Excel spreadsheet, then you’re already working with data. And, as long as it’s correctly structured, you can simply plug it in to a BI tool that helps you turn it into easy to digest charts and graphs.

In addition to this, most business software and services nowadays allow you to either export data or to connect to it directly with BI tools.

What this means is that all, or most, of your business’ data is easily accessible. There’s no coding to do, no data mining software needed, no data professionals to hire.

Most of the time, your data can either be exported from where it is in excel or csv format or connected via BI tool with just a couple of clicks.

Then your only job is to drunk the numbers, analyse and visualise your data to start gaining the benefits of business intelligence.

4. Tools are easier to use

One of the main reservations anyone who runs a business might have for implementing BI is that it’s too complicated. They know nothing about how to analyse data and build dashboards so they have no business even trying to.

Now, I’m a BI professional so I kind of agree with this. However, a lot of BI tools these days are easy to use and built intentionally for the business user, even for the complete novice, rather than the technical user.

And the tool’s creators do everything they can to make the learning curve as flat as possible.

Things like building the tool to minimise risks of placing things in queries where you shouldn’t, providing video training and guidance within the tool and even giving you pre-built templates that you can simply plug your data directly into and take away the need for you to build dashboards yourself.

This isn’t to say that there’s no learning curve at all and time will be needed to get up and running but it shouldn’t be a daunting prospect.

And it probably won’t take as long as you think. Maybe just a few hours, before you start to get to grips with your chosen tool.

5. It’s not time-consuming

Talking of time, the fifth and final reason why every business should implement BI is that it is not time-consuming.

What I mean is that, once your data is connected to your BI tool and your dashboards are built, you’re not going to need to consistently spend hours of time consulting and reading them to try and make sense of the data.

The idea is that your dashboards and reports should be there to help you monitor your business activities. Dashboards by their very definition are meant to be “at-a-glance”.

Meaning just that. Most of the time you will only need to glance at them to check how things are performing. Or, rather, whether they’re performing as you’d expect.

The visual nature of your charts and graphs, as I demonstrated earlier, will allow you to spot anomalies in the data and take action if required.

I would recommend taking a more in-depth look at your data on a regular basis, say, weekly or monthly but definitely not daily. So, basically, once you’re up and running BI shouldn’t need to take up a lot of your valuable time.

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