How can you use data and analytics more strategically?
In recent years, business have become more aware of the advantages of using data strategically, which was happened alongside the increased availability of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. However, it’s not always easy knowing where to start or how to use this to drive your business forward.
In this blog, we’ll cover 5 ways you can better use data and analytics using readily available tools to transform the way you work and grow.
- Discover Actionable Insights and Correlations
All businesses have a massive amount of data collected from different sources, however unless it is aggregated, transformed, remodelled, and analysed, it holds no true value.
A BI solution will do this for you and present it so the data is simple to understand. This will help uncover insights, and more importantly the correlation between actions and outcomes. Solutions such as Microsoft Power BI, also use AI to allow users to ask questions in plain English, and Power BI will process the data to deliver an answer, along with simple data visualisation.
- Make Data-Driven Strategic Decisions
Once you’ve used a BI solution to discover insights and correlations, the next goal is to use these insights to make data-driven strategic decisions. A comprehensive BI solution will have predictive analytics functionality that allows users to create a machine learning model that will predict the future outcomes of a business.
These predictive models can be the basis for decision making, with the functionality to view how changes will affect future outcomes. Predictive analytics will increase in accuracy over time as there is more data to process.
- Visualise Complex Data
Most people find it easier to comprehend data in images rather than raw numbers in a table. With Power BI, there are countless ways that data can be visualised, and as it is an interactive dashboard, users can change the visualisation to suit them. This may include viewing the data at a high level to view trends or drilling down to granular details.
- Prepare Department Reports
Most businesses will have to provide regular reporting for stakeholders across the business, which is often a very time-consuming process, especially if it requires manually sorting through data to create graphs and tables. With a BI solution, these graphs and tables can be created once, and then the data can be automatically refreshed when it needs to be used in a report.
Similarly, individual employees or departments may benefit from having a custom dashboard with key statistics displayed at all times. This may include call volumes, sales numbers, time to answer calls, or application uptime. With a solution such as Power BI, dashboards can be quickly and easily created for any use case, with the data being updated as regularly as required.
- Make Use of Real-Time Insights
Whilst some data only needs to be periodically, other data is more valuable if it is refreshed in real-time- such as social media data, or application uptime. Some BI solutions have real-time functionality, where a dashboard can be created that streams live data whilst creating visualisations. With these insights being displayed in real-time, businesses can make data-driven decisions at a moment's notice, without having to manually sort data, or refresh any datasets.
How To Get Started
Starting to make use of data is something that will benefit every business that decides to invest in it. Whilst BI solutions, such as Power BI, are designed to be easy to use, many businesses partner with a trusted IT provider to assist in creating dashboards and connecting disparate data sources. If your business is looking to implement a BI solution, contact us today.