How 3 Factors Will Drive Your Approach to Business Intelligence

Findings from a recent study by Gartner showed that the number of organizations embracing business intelligence (BI) platforms continues to grow, but more focus is being placed on business-led, agile analytics and self-service features rather than IT-led system-of-record reporting.

Overall, Gartner predicts that the global BI and analytics market will reach $18.3 in value this year, an increase of 7.3 percent over last year, and the market will grow to $22.8 billion by the end of 2020.

“Purchasing decisions continue to be influenced heavily by business executives and users who want more agility and the option for small personal and departmental deployments to prove success,” said Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner. “Enterprise-friendly buying models have become more critical to successful deployments.”

Modern Drivers of Business Intelligence

Many factors are driving the evolving business intelligence market. These are three worth highlighting:

Behavioral Analytics

Companies are beginning to understand the value in dissecting the behavior impulses that drive consumers to and around your website. This includes how much time they spend on individual pages, the percentage of people that leave after seeing just one page, the number of specific pages they visited, what caused them to convert, and so on.

“A trail of digital breadcrumbs to see where people have come from and where they go as it pertains to your brand is the future of business intelligence,” says Dan Schoenbaum, CEO of Cooladata, a behavioral analytics and business intelligence platform.

Businesses now more than ever are craving the tools to analyze diverse, often broad and complex, combinations of data sources. “We are able to integrate datasets from Facebook, social media, email campaigns, web traffic, mobile applications, online ad exposure, and third party applications such as Hubspot, Optimizely, Salesforce and many more — into a single, complete picture for companies. This allows them to truly see the success of behavioral analytics because they are capable of analyzing an entire customer journey, not just clicks on a website,” says Schoenbaum.

Cloud Deployments

Previous generations of business intelligence tools assisted with the cognitive awareness of clicks and page loads on the web and mobile arenas, but required a sprawling architecture that included brick-and-mortar data warehouses and separate visualization tools. This created a complicated workflow and failed to provide a full and efficient analysis of business analytics.

In fact, data warehouses still have a complicated integration process, requiring knowledge of SQL and a development team. Not to mention the separate products to build out the warehouse are a huge expense, Mixpanel for funnel analysis, Amazon Redshift data system, and Tableau for dashboarding and BI.

However, “Cloud deployments of BI and analytics platforms have the potential to reduce cost of ownership and speed time to deployment,” according to Rita Sallam, research vice president at Gartner. As digital marketing and sales become more integrated and advanced, the need for a transparent, central view of data will only continue to increase.

From a geographical standpoint, a BI 2016 industry market research shows the market for business intelligence spreading across regions from North America, Europe, Middle East, Latin America to Asia. This demonstrates that in the next few years, there’s no doubt that BI solutions will be in high demand, including the flexible and economic benefits that businesses can enjoy from cloud-based solutions.

Smart Data

For years, big data has allowed enterprises access to massive volumes of data. But as we are learning, big data is bulky, and our ability to analyze it for quick, precise decisions declines the more data we gather. An emerging solution to this is “Smart Data,” which has the potential to solve these problems and help firms adapt faster to developments, especially in industries like e-commerce.

“Businesses are starting to understand the value of the data, but they still aren’t fully leveraging it,” says Schoenbaum. “It is exciting to unlock that potential for companies all over the world. Companies need to go from collecting data to applying smart, real-time analysis. It’s what I like to call ‘Smart Data.’ Old data is less useful, but analyzing trends as they happen will provide the best value and help companies be more successful.”

Businesses that leverage innovations in the Smart Data field will ensure a competitive leg-up and their customers will gain trust as they see the brand evolving to predictive, behavioral-driven decisions based on the analysis of previous interaction.

Analysis Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "How 3 Factors Will Drive Your Approach to Business Intelligence" was first published on Small Business Trends