The Importance of Providing BI for All Types of Users
Providing BI for all types of users is critical, especially for small to medium-sized businesses. With today’s solutions, BI is no longer reserved for larger businesses and corporations that can afford to hire BI analysts. Making key business decisions based on hard data is something that every business can benefit from. In addition, BI can be used by multiple people within an organization who work in different departments or who operate at different levels. It isn’t just for the executives and managers anymore. The idea is to use BI to find solutions that arise from the questions that surface within their own departments.
BI Empowers Its Users
Having the ability to make accurate and effective decisions is empowering. With BI, key decision-makers have a chance to trust that the actions they take are going to have a positive outcome. Even in SMBs, there are multiple people who make decisions that impact the overall success of the business. Decisions such as deciding how much inventory needs to be stocked, determining how to cut costs without impacting performance, and controlling operational risks are often difficult to make without the right tools. BI solutions are empowering because these decisions are no longer made blindly. This is because analyzing hard data to aid in decision-making leads to predictable outcomes.
BI Should Be Accessible to Everyone
By making data accessible to everyone, it will enable departments and individuals within an organization to make key business decisions that will help move the company forward. This is the optimal approach because BI gives all departments a chance to make educated decisions based on analysis. Executives need to use BI to clearly see the big picture so that they can make decisions that will help encourage the company’s long-term growth. Managers need BI to perform analysis and make decisions on an operational level. Analysts use BI to gain key insights about a company so that they can share them with the executives and managers. Other people within the company, such as those in the sales and marketing departments, benefit from using a BI solution because they have access to key product and customer performance data.
When it comes to Business Intelligence for SMBs, it is important to provide it for all types of users. In fact, key decisions that impact your company should not be made without it! This holds true for executives, managers, and users in all departments. The end goal is to use a BI solution that has the ability to collect data from a variety of sources so that it can present all of its users with the analytics and insights needed to move the company forward, along with the flexibility needed to present information to users in multiple ways that accommodate their different roles, needs and skill levels.