What businesses expect from BI in a post-COVID world?
As businesses continue to find newer ways of functioning and survival amidst the pandemic, their expectations from business intelligence and analytics have also changed. These unprecedented circumstances have fostered the need for faster, real-time analytics that empowers businesses to trigger informed actions instantly. Businesses now demand next-gen BI technology that can show them accurate signals and help them prepare for the future.
Let us look at how these expectations are shaping the BI technology landscape in a post COVID world.
Analytics-driven automation at all levels
While Covid-19 has taught us how to collaborate remotely and figure out impact-full ways of connecting with our customers and employees, businesses still need mechanisms to measure the outcomes of these changes. They are now looking at incorporating analytics at all levels, from tactical to strategic, so that data across processes and departments can be synthesized to bring out unified insights, within short timelines.
Business owners need reliable systems to blend data from multiple sources, applications, locations, people etc., and create secure data pipelines. With people working remotely and using multiple systems, it has become even more important to collate and analyze this data effectively.
To meet this requirement BI technology providers must shift focus on delivering data engineering solutions that can capture and connect data from multiple sources and locations. The process of data collection, transformation and warehousing should to be automated to speed up data preparation and build automated data workflows as per business requirements.
In addition, automated alerts and notifications should be configured to trigger the next set of actions without manual intervention. For example, if the demand of a particular product is projected to go up in the next 5 days, the system should trigger alerts to the inventory and sales department with projections on how much quantity needs to be procured to meet the demand. Such automated workflows add speed to business operations and the same time, ensure that the right insights are available to all the stakeholders, irrespective of where they are working from.
Proactive mode of working
Our experience with the pandemic has taught us one straight lesson – that we need to prepare for the future intelligently. There will always be unforeseen events and situations, but with the right technologies in place, businesses can be better equipped to steer through the next eventuality.
Thanks to data science and machine learning, technologies are now in place to explore humongous data sets, test millions of probabilities, and provide accurate forecasts in the shortest time. BI technology is now moving in the direction of automating the construction of complex queries basis the business use case and proactively send recommendations to analysts on how they should prioritize their attention.
At this time, when businesses are looking to accelerate their pace of decision making, being able to pro-act on the basis of data insights is crucial for their success. The next-gen BI technology platforms with built-in machine learning and data science features enable users across roles to work effectively with all their data, make informed decisions every day and switch to a proactive mode of working.
Today companies need to make crucial decisions basis the insights that they have in that moment. Businesses must seize any and every opportunity to dig into their data, use the insights proactively. Going forward, a company’s success will depend on their ability to analyze their data and act on the insight promptly.
BI technology providers must be ready to support this shift by enabling real-time data pipelines and insights at fastest pace ever.
