Trends in Business Intelligence You Can’t Miss

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, staying ahead of the competition requires businesses to embrace the power and transformative trends in business intelligence (BI).

There is nothing worse for a business than being slowed by a cumbersome digital infrastructure. Yet, this is the reality for companies whose internal processes fail to match the data needs of the 21st century.

Recent developments in BI offer a new approach to data insights and architecture that can elevate your business goals to match the current competitive landscape.

From data centralization and user-guided navigation to artificial intelligence and data-driven cultures, these trends in business intelligence are revolutionizing the way organizations operate and leverage data.

Below are eight key BI trends to transform your current business and data processes:

1. Centralizing an entry point

Employees use a significant number of tools on a daily basis. When these tools aren’t under a single platform employees find themselves switching back and forth between multiple accounts to perform everyday tasks. Simultaneously, internal data and content gets saved on different platforms making it harder for employees to quickly find what they need when they need it. In the long-run, content and other vital information falls through the cracks.

But with a centralised BI strategy, businesses never have to worry. Centralised BI strategies create a single and consistent set of business data that facilitates an up-to-date view of information across the entire company.

At Crystalloids, we are leveraging Google’s latest BI tool Looker to provide our clients with a single point of contact — a bird’s eye view — all on one platform. With Looker, business users can find all necessary and supportive information in one place. This allows a quicker turn-around on informed decision-making.

2. Intuitive BI navigation

Modern BI solutions, such as Looker data platform, deliver a single point of access to reports, dashboards, and accompanying artifacts. But in order for your business to take advantage of this new centralized structure, navigating BI assets is key. Your BI solution must be structured with intuitive and user-friendly navigation, so employees can easily explore and use the solution.

Trends in business intelligence are now focusing on tools like Looker which are equipped with user-friendly navigation boards so employees can take advantage of the added value BI brings to tasks. Proper navigation on board will save them time and effort. With the proper BI tool, finding the right assets to tell the right stories at the right moment, has never been easier.

3. Handling volumes of data

As your business grows, so does the amount of data you collect. Usually, this data is collected from various sources and then used by varying departments to gain insights.

With different data streams, the main challenge for a business arises when employees want to use data from varying sources to perform analysis and create visual reports. In these instances, employees usually wonder the following:

How do we integrate different data sources onto one report without affecting the performance, logic, and rules? How can we control the business logic and rules of our reports from a central point of view?

With the proper BI tool, all these questions can be addressed and resolved.

Crystalloids has extensive experience in resolving these challenges and building well-performing and beneficial solutions using the products under the Google Cloud ecosystem while tailoring to our clients unique business needs.

4. Embedding a semantic layer

Once you have resolved the issue of connecting different data sources and merging them into a central data warehouse, the next hurdle for businesses becomes the ability to combine them all in order to serve the same purpose.

The best solution is a semantic layer that can store all the logic without interfering with performance.

A semantic layer is a business representation of data that offers a unified and consolidated view of data across an organisation. With a semantic layer, different data definitions from different sources can be quickly mapped for a unified, consistent, and single view of data for analytics and other business purposes.

More businesses are now integrating BI solutions, such as Looker, that have the semantic layer built-in. If your current BI tool does not have this embedded layer, Crystalloids has wide experience in helping you.

5. Integrating AI use cases

AI is booming the market and has changed our awareness of opportunity, but many businesses are struggling with integrating AI into their working processes. We find many clients asking the same question:

How can we implement AI into our routine and get value from it?

There are many use cases on how you can use AI and ML models in combination with BI to work with marketing departments, activate audiences with marketing tools and advertising platforms, and help make forecasts and predictions to inform business decisions.

At Crystalloids, our portfolios include use cases where these AI models have been integrated into the daily activities of our clients.

6. Customizing BI activation

With the right BI solution, you can customize in order to better visualise your data and support different types of user groups in their decision-making process. Using Looker, Crystalloids has been able to develop customizations that allow our clients to import and activate data selections at the click of a button.

The magic of Business Intelligence segmentation (our latest calling card), will be discussed in a series of forthcoming articles. In the meantime, our BI whitepaper offers key insights on this topic and more. You can download it here.

7. Sharing the data 

A business is not built on one singular element. In the business structure there are always stakeholders such as- partners, suppliers, employees of all types, and third-party organisations. Building communication between these parties is not an easy task, but vital for the prosperity of a business. As a business grows finding a balance between information sharing and access rights is key for long term success.

BI tools and platforms are working hard to make information sharing and access rights easy and simple. With the proper BI tool in place your stakeholders are able to share reports, dashboards, and materials in different formats without the worry of data leaks and prying eyes.

Current BI platforms like Looker, allow you to maintain different levels of access and privacy. Dataset, table, dashboard or report, folder — now the level of open access depends on the level best suited for your communication purposes.

8. Cultivating a BI data culture

The last but not the most minor thing we would like to mention when discussing trends in business intelligence in trends is culture.  You can create over-the-top dashboards and reports and create many activation use cases, but they prove useless if your employees resist learning and working with the BI solution.

Creating a culture in which you excite your employees to be data-driven and open to new solutions is critical.

Our prior experience has shown that for some businesses this is the most challenging part of their BI and data-driven journey. Fortunately, we have a positive track record of building processes to achieve employee acceptance of new features and tools, and we know ways that work.

Conclusion

These eight trends in business intelligence lead us to the conclusion that now is the right moment to seize the opportunity that modern Business Intelligence technology and best practices are offering to outperform the competition and to put trustworthy and actionable insights at the fingertips of your employees and partners.

As the first Looker partner in The Netherlands, Crystalloids has been working with BI since 2017. We recognize the growing need for our clients to integrate BI and take advantage of our experience to elevate their business needs. These trends in business intelligence prove that now is the time to seize the opportunity modern BI technology is offering and at Crystalloids we can show you how.

ABOUT CRYSTALLOIDS

Crystalloids helps companies improve their customer experiences and build marketing technology. Founded in 2006 in the Netherlands, Crystalloids builds crystal-clear solutions that turn customer data into information and knowledge into wisdom. As a leading Google Cloud Partner, Crystalloids combines experience in software development, data science, and marketing, making them one of a kind IT company. Using the Agile approach, Crystalloids ensures that use cases show immediate value to their clients and make their job focus more on decision making and less on programming.