Consultants at Aptitive have seen a dramatic shift to data analytics in recent years. Rather than just focusing on collecting data into a business application, the emphasis of business intelligence has been to enable both technical and non-technical users to answer questions, discover trends, and share results across the company.

Although Aptitive stays “tool agnostic” in order to allow our clients the room to explore the best option for their company, I want to highlight tools (ie: Tableau, PowerBI, and Qlik) that are especially disruptive at providing some key value-adds of our client’s BI solutions:

-Increasing information

-Visualizing results

-Creating a BI ecosystem

Disruption #1: Increasing Information

Disruptive BI tools are great at allowing companies to connect to outside information. For example, during a marking campaign, an Illinois company is looking to create personalized products. What names should they print on the merchandise? Obviously, collecting that information on their own is unpractical. The good news is the data is already available via Big Data platforms such as Google BigQuery and is easily accessible via new BI tools like Tableau!

Now consider other information available in the world of Big Data (not to mention what is constantly being created). New BI allows our clients to easily connect with information outside of the traditional ERP and expands their ability to answer new questions about the business.

Figure 1: Tableau connecting to Social Security Administration database via Google BigQuery

Disruption #2: Visualizing Results

Data access needs to be intuitive. The new tier of BI tools strives to provide vivid visualizations of data and enables users to discover previously unseen trends within their data. For example, last year, a company promoted a particular product line in the US, but not in Europe. Was there increased revenue in the US? How did the product do in Europe? What is the trend compared to other, unadvertised product lines?

Visualizing data not only leads to answering inductive questions, but also allows a discovery process that leads to asking better questions. Access to data will ultimately allow users to make more persuasive arguments to management for action and overall better decisions!

Figure 2: Microsoft PowerBI analysis of Sales by Territory and Product Line

Disruption #3: Creating a BI Ecosystem

Finally, the disruptive BI tools allow for better access, sharing, and communication regardless of location. Specifically, the cloud infrastructure allows users to distribute reports that are interactive and provides a basis for other users to ask new questions. Rather than emailing a basic list or data dump, the business can filter and collaborate on reports in real time and from a variety of devices.

By creating a community of users in the cloud, companies can encourage the adoption of BI in normal business operations and build an ecosystem of data-driven decision-making.

Figure 3: Publishing dashboards to QlikCloud for better sharing across the business

Conclusion

The new wave of business intelligence technology can create tremendous value and challenges for a company. Whether you’re creating a new BI infrastructure or trying to derive more value out of an existing platform, it is beneficial to have a partner, like Aptitive, to help build an analytics strategy and implement the best solution! Please reach out if you would like to discuss more.