Can Business Intelligence Applications Really Improve Competency?

You’re watching the industry and your competitors and you see that they are expanding into business intelligence applications. You have dabbled in this area somewhat, but not all attempts have proven to be fruitful. Perhaps the failure was in the vendor you selected, the culture in which the implementation would be driven or the overall challenges faced by the end user. Regardless, it is time to give business intelligence applications another try. Why? They have been proven to help businesses just like yours to improve competency and this improvement can be felt in your bottom line.

Business Intelligence Applications Prove Insight from Data

If your company has been in business for any length of time, you have a nice collection of data on the market, your current customers, your competitors, your partners and more. While this information may just be kept in a database or simply in spreadsheets, this is still valuable data that you can easily plug into business intelligence applications to turn it into valuable data. The issue has never been a lack of data – the challenge is to understand what data adds value and what data just adds extra work. A recent survey showed that 60 percent of executives believe they have more information than they can use. This may even be true for your company. It does not mean that you should eliminate all attempts at gaining insight from that data, however, it just means that you need business intelligence applications to sort through it.

Business Intelligence Applications to Make Sense of Data

You and those you report to are likely to be in the market for a solution that enables you to drive better decisions and improve your overall business performance. Did you know that top-performing businesses are twice as likely to take advantage of business analytics to drive future strategies and day-to-day operations as compared with lower performers? That means that your competitors who own a larger share of the market are likely leveraging business intelligence applications to drive effectiveness across their organization, leaving you behind. If you want to take your business to the next level, it’s time to take a closer look at business intelligence applications.

Business Intelligence Applications Enable Reporting

If your company is like many others in your field, you have specific reporting to complete. Perhaps this reporting needs to happen just within your company, or perhaps you report to partners, vendors or shareholders. Regardless of the audience, you still need to be able to gather intelligent information to present a true representation of the company’s performance for better decision making moving forward. Business intelligence applications not only allow you to capture that information, they also allow you to effectively report on your current progress, potential opportunities, threats and projected successes. When decisions have to be made with real-time information, you can’t get any better than what you can pull from business intelligence applications.

To dominate in any field, it really is all about competency and what your business intelligence applications can do to improve your data capture, decision making and reporting. While this truly just skims the surface, these three things can easily point you in the right direction to achieve optimal competency.