From the analysis of the past to the prediction of the future.

: 3 traits of predictive business intelligence.

In a highly versatile and competitive business scenario, those companies that manage to survive are those that take a reactive position, adapting their strategies to changes and anticipating new trends. Therefore, the value of organisations today lies in their ability to produce and manage knowledge in an innovative way. In this sense, information is becoming one of the most valuable assets for companies.

This fact means that investments in information technologies are gaining capital importance; especially business intelligence, one of the business management areas that has been growing the most in recent years.

The main reasons are that it provides speed and reliability when making decisions, two fundamental factors in the current situation. Its function is to collect, process and present data to turn it into relevant information for the company, a process that involves various technologies, from Big Data extraction systems to analytical solutions or visualization tools.

The success or failure of a business intelligence strategy will be defined by the way companies obtain, process and present that data. That is, by the analytical capabilities of its systems, which evolve as new technologies are developed, and by the training and skills of its employees when creating and interpreting information.

Today's business intelligence systems are the result of an evolution from reporting tools, which later included analysis, later monitoring, and today incorporate the prediction layer. It is the latter that offers a real qualitative leap, as we will see below.

These are the elements that characterize the new business intelligence strategies:

Provide relevant information, not data

Companies have more and more data. Paradoxically, this does not guarantee that they will have access to more useful information about your business. The question that arises then is how to make all that data become a means to make the right decisions for the future of the organization. The answer is found in business intelligence: locate, extract and store data from customers, employees, processes, departments, databases, applications, etc.

But this will be of no use if you lack a powerful management system that is capable of ordering them and putting them in context. One of the main functions of this data model is to provide a deeper level of knowledge that facilitates, for example, patterns of behaviour of the market, customers or competitors. The next level within the system's capabilities will be to detect threats and opportunities to anticipate.

Transversal to the entire organization

The new analytics solutions are becoming more and more complete, not only in their capabilities but also in their scope: they now involve a greater number of aspects within the organization.

For this reason, they have ceased to be an exclusive strategy of the management and of a certain area. Its use is being generalized to different departments and areas of companies with the development of simpler and more accessible interfaces and personalized mobile and desktop applications that make this penetration ever greater at all levels.

This is the result of developing data analysis tools that offer useful functionalities to make the right decision in all departments of the company, from marketing to sales, finance or human resources.

This includes designing and customizing marketing actions, studying the market situation, analyzing the internal needs of the company and available resources, etc. on competition in any area of ​​the company.

Integration and visualization

The transversal nature of business intelligence is directly related to the commitment to integration, which is key to saving time, working with greater agility and multiplying the capacity of the databases.

Unifying different services and tools (CRM, ERP, mobile applications, Field Service tools, marketing solutions, etc.) in a single platform is a growing trend that will reduce costs and work time.

Once all the relevant information has been collected, validated and processed, it is time to present it in the appropriate format for each user. This consists of connecting all the data whatever its format or the platform it is on (Excel spreadsheets, emails, content from social networks and even files hosted on cloud services) and transforming them into dashboards, reports and charts that help you find answers to your most important business questions at a glance.