We are in a digitised and data-driven era where the technological landscape is changing rapidly. Enterprises are dependent on data that can generate actionable insights. With the explosion of data, businesses constantly face challenges to leverage them effectively.
This article is a complete guide to business intelligence (BI). It also highlights the different challenges enterprises face while dealing with Business Intelligence.
What is business intelligence (BI)?
Business intelligence (BI) refers to the technique of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data. It helps to make better business decisions. BI also helps in understanding the business goals and objectives with market demand. It is a technology-driven process. It allows organizations to collect and analyze data from diverse sources. Some well-known sources are customer traction, sales figures, website traffic, etc.
Enterprises and organizations use BI analysis to predict customer requirements. It also helps in getting a better overview of competitors’ positions and strengths. BI can analyse market trends and track sales performance. Some companies don’t have the expertise in BI analysis. This is where outsourcing business intelligence services come to play.
BI challenges and solutions
BI offers many benefits to organisations. However, there are multiple challenges organizations face when leveraging BI. This section will address the challenges and solutions experts follow with BI.
Challenge 1: appropriate data integration
Businesses extract data from many sources. BI often stumbles to merge them logically from these sources. It leads to data silos. Insufficient data restrain executives from suitable decision-making.
Solution
Enterprises can opt for robust BI tools that merge data based on size and type. Suitable software and expert BI professionals can help eliminate such issues. Enterprises can outsource BI operations to business analytics services for better ROI.
Challenge 2: data security
Most companies are well aware when handling company and customer data. Cybercriminals have prying eyes on corporate data. Thus, securing the data for BI analytics is a prime concern.
Solution
Enterprises and organisations use strong security policies. Security tools like firewalls, IAM solutions, anti-malware, etc., can protect the data from breaches.
Challenge 3: real-time Analytics
It is an essential feature that helps businesses to get insights dynamically. Business executives can quickly change plans according to market situations through it. But real-time analytics through BI often face challenges when dealing with massive data. Systems can even lag while handling heterogeneous data.
Solution
Enterprises must leverage robust BI tools and cloud services. Also, to support massive real-time analytics, businesses must use GPUs. It can help render data dynamically. GPUs will perform parallel processing to generate real-time analytics seamlessly.
Challenge 4: poor data quality
Because of poor data integration and lack of data management from multiple sources, the data quality decreases. It makes BI analysis insignificant. Poor data quality in BI can lead to incorrect insights. Hence, it will hamper the decision-making power.
Solution
Enterprises must hire expert data modelers and data analysis professionals. They should appropriately stitch data from different sources. Also, enterprises should leverage robust and intelligent BI tools. These tools should offer features to integrate data seamlessly.
Challenge 5: Poor data visualisation
Another challenge enterprises face while utilising BI is poor data visualisation. Insufficient data leads to poor data visualization. Again, the wrong interpretation of data through visuals can lead to bad decisions. Rigid visualisation templates/libraries and lack of interactivity can be challenging. Also, delay in pulling real-time data for visualisation and even the wrong colour choice may cause issues.
Solution
Enterprises should choose the right dashboard that offers interactive visuals. Those apps and dashboards should run on enterprise-grade GPUs for better rendering. Also, BI analysts should ensure that they are feeding the correct data. It will increase the accuracy of insights.
Takeaway
We hope this article provided a quick guide on the challenges of BI. It also highlighted how to solve these issues. Business Intelligence is a blessing to enterprises and modern businesses. It provides significant benefits to enterprises through data. However, enterprises should take proactive measures to overcome diverse challenges while implementing BI. By investing in the right tools and processes, enterprises can overcome the BI challenges.
Tim Williamson, a psychology graduate from the University of Hertfordshire, has a keen interest in the fields of mental health, wellness, and lifestyle.
