If you’re involved in business in any capacity, whether you independently own a small business, a mid-sized company or are the CEO of a multinational corporation, you can be sure that technology is quickly changing the way you work every day. However, technology doesn’t have to be disrupting and business intelligence tools can revolutionise the way you approach analytics and help maximise your profits.
However, choosing a BI tool tailor made for your business can be difficult when you’re unfamiliar with business intelligence software. Here are a few tips on how to find the right business intelligence tool for your business.
Determine Your Business Needs
Choosing the right business intelligence tool for your company doesn’t have to be difficult, but the first and more important step is to determine your needs and the function the technology will play for you. You must consider whether you need a business intelligence tool for salespeople to access customer information or product specifics when they’re out on the floor, or whether you require the software to instead help contextualise large amounts of data in order to project sales trends and forecast your inventory needs in the coming quarters.
You must decide the role that business intelligence will play for you before picking a program, you want to be sure you have the most sophisticated system that is functional in the right way.
Visualise How You Will Adapt to Business Intelligence
Now that you know how you will use business intelligence software it’s time to rethink your overall business strategy. This type of technology can help increase your productivity and make sense of raw data, but only if you have a comprehensive plan to use this tool. Now that you have business intelligence you have to plan how you will disseminate it’s visualised data across various departments so your colleagues have access to all the information and ensure that the software is fully integrated on your website so it is more widely accessible.
Choosing the Right Provider
The last step to choosing the best business intelligence tool is to pick the right provider or vendor. There are a myriad of software choices, but once you have fully considered what type of functionality you require from the program, it will be easier to pick out the top contenders. You should also check out a business intelligence buyer’s guide and narrow your choice down to a few contenders.
Now that you’ve picked your top two or three solutions, consider inviting some potential vendors for a demonstration of the software so you can see in real time how everything works. Make sure you pick a provider that has excellent user support and is oriented towards future technological developments. Also pick a system that is easily scalable in case your needs eventually grow in the future.
Conclusion
Picking the right business intelligence software can give you a definite edge in today’s business environment. BI technology will help you in gathering and contextualising data that will allow you to make better decisions at all levels.
