The New Essential: Business Intelligence Integration
According to a recent Nucleus Research study, business intelligence projects are yielding a return on investment of nearly %10,000. Wait, what? How can something so successful fly under the radar of so many? As one of the top business intelligence integration and enterprise software consulting firms to the mid market, we understand just how this works. Let us explain.
With innovative software solutions like Tableau and Microsoft’s new Power BI, organizations are beginning to adopt approaches and technologies that make it easy to integrate data with analytics. Once implemented, business intelligence and analytics tools are capable of working synergistically with other enterprise software; such as CRM and ERP systems, to create an ecosystem that is both dynamic and transparent. This makes decision making easier; as the information in the hands of executives is more defined, accurate, and actionable than ever before.
The result of this complete enterprise connection— wrapped in business intelligence integration— is a formula for process improvement, the elimination of waste, and the advanced allocation of resources. The endgame is a company that returns a significant profit for this complete integration deployment.
How does this business intelligence integration work?
Organizations with investments in valuable ERP, CRM, analytics, e-commerce, and other enterprise software often greatly benefit from creating a single-source-of-truth. This means connecting this software so that it can effectively work together; sharing data, passing information back-and-forth, and ensuring a singular dataset for things like accounts and contacts. Organizations can produce a similar dynamic with their analytics by adding a business intelligence integration. By having BI intertwined in with all of these interconnected systems organizations can vastly improve their organizations reporting and transparency. Leading to visibility of challenges and cost-killers that went unnoticed previously.
Companies that do not take advantage of business intelligence integration must rely on data that is manually assembled. Even if this could be done, it would very time-consuming. With the amount of valuable data created by modern ERP, CRM, and e-commerce systems this is essentially impossible in a comprehensive fashion.
Back to that %10,000 ROI
So what can we glean from this? Basically, organizations without connected systems or business intelligence integration’s aren’t able to collect any of this critical data in the same they could if they were to create an interconnected enterprise software ecosystem. This means their ability to create actionable reports that improve business processes, manage human capital, cut wasted spending, negotiate contracts, and more is remedial compared to those with the interconnected systems.
These actionable reports created through the use of analytics tools, BI and connected enterprise software provide such a a valuable advantage for the businesses that utilize them that we have no trouble seeing the $10.61 return for every dollar spent that Nucleus was able to demonstrate in their study.
What’s important to understand is that these businesses aren’t simply installing business intelligence software. They are integrating it into an environment that is strategically designed to share information and provide universal organizational business insight. This means a data-connected ERP, CRM, and e-commerce platform wrapped in a fuly-integrated business intelligence system.
What you can do about it
As one of the most experienced and diverse enterprise software consulting firms in North America, our blog contains a wealth information regarding how/why you could create an interconnected enterprise software environment. We spend a lot of time these days speaking to clients about who they can best implement solutions like Tableu in to the integrated systems. A lot of those conversations center around the fundamental reason for the implementation. What’s important to remember that a software implementation has almost nothing to do with software. The software itself is all cost. What your organization can leverage the software to do is all ROI. When implementing these solutions be sure to spend considerable time modeling correct processes, defining objectives, and training business leaders on how to effectively use the software,
It’s extremely likely that the demand for BI software will increase. In fact, analysts with the A.T. Kearney project report that spending on hardware, software, and services related to Big Data will grow at a rate of 30% through 2018. The numbers are modest. We expect business intelligence integration to grow considerably by the end of the year.
If you’d like help integrating a BI solution like Tableu or Power BI in to your current environment. Contact us today. We understand how to best align these tools with your current software.
