Business intelligence (BI) has been helping companies to efficiently collect, analyze, monitor, and present their data to extract actionable information that ensures sustainable growth. To ensure the most effective use of business intelligence reports, organizations should adopt the following best practices when creating and using the reports. Take advantage of conditional formatting capabilities to highlight report cells when a particular condition is met. Interactive report inclusions allow you to interact with different report views and filter, drill down, pivot, sort, resize rows and columns, add totals and much more.
While the reports weren't as popular in response, it's still considered a standard feature of business intelligence software. Collecting and preparing data is an important step in starting a deeper analysis. Different organizations need different business intelligence functions depending on their requirements. To begin with, it's best to invest in a solution that offers basic functions, such as creating dashboards and visualization, generating reports, data integration, and more.
Later on, you can upgrade your solution to incorporate additional features, such as predictive analytics, mobile business intelligence, augmented analytics, and more. AI-based analytics for your modern data set The value of business intelligence reports lies in their ability to provide a deep understanding of a company's performance and operations, with which you can act accordingly. In traditional analytical practices, business intelligence reports are prepared in advance by highly technical teams for executives. By providing accurate and timely information on trends, customer preferences, market conditions, and more, BI reports help executives make smarter decisions that can improve the overall efficiency and effectiveness of their company.
In addition to helping decision making, BI reports also help companies identify new opportunities for growth and improvement. Every BI report requires taking advantage of the company's data set, which includes data storage, governance, security, ingestion, and data analysis. Today's leading data companies have adopted the modern data stack, which often includes cloud data platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift and Azure Synapse, ETL or ELT tools such as Fivetran and Matillion, data catalogs and more. By using these best tools along with the right analytics experience, companies can help their entire organization quickly generate, understand and act on the most effective BI reports.
Business intelligence reports provide information that can help you make better decisions for your business. The most valuable democratize this value, allowing all types of users to harness the value of business intelligence. Now that we've briefly discussed the benefits of using BI software in your company, it's time to list the main features you should consider when investing in them. Considered to be a more advanced feature, predictive analysis remains one of the main needs of BI software buyers; 42% of respondents express interest in predictive analysis.
Having the option to “dig deeper into the data” which involves delving into the details of a data set is a feature that was mentioned in 10% of the responses. Data mining, ETL (Extract Transform Load), OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) and breakdown functions are often big data functions and may not be needed by small businesses or the perception of these functions could alienate small businesses. Along with that, the tool also offers the possibility of combining several types of graphics into one to discover hidden information behind valuable business data. Companies can generate more accurate and detailed reports that provide a more complete view of their operations and system intelligence automatically identifies trends patterns and anomalies that users should investigate as they prepare their BI report.
Intelligent BI tools have functions such as natural language processing (NLP) so that users can query data through questions without the need to program. For some years now business intelligence (BI) has helped companies to efficiently collect analyze monitor and present their data to extract actionable information that ensures sustainable growth. This way the dashboards and reports you create will be available at all times whether you're out of the office or presenting them on a larger screen to facilitate a business meeting. Being able to automatically generate reports from external customers is another of the most important features of business intelligence tools that you should consider.
Considering that 74% of employees say they feel overwhelmed when working with data the ability to provide accessible solutions that allow everyone to work with data in an intuitive and accessible way is an indisputable benefit. Implementing integrated analytics in your company can help you provide your employees investors partners customers or any other relevant stakeholder with an excellent reporting experience with better information about the relevant data. Although it seems like an advanced feature more and more BI software developers are including easy-to-use predictive analysis technologies in their self-service solutions. This will help ensure that the data included in the report is relevant and provide useful information.
While BI reports will be specifically tailored to the needs of your business there are some outstanding best practices in business intelligence reporting.
