Modern business intelligence(BI) and data visualization tools are cheaper, faster, and easier to use than ever. If you are struggling to make sense of your data as it grows in size and complexity, it is time to look at BI/data visualization tools to analyze your data more effectively and efficiently.

Low Cost

BI tools have changed the way business decisions are made, they help transform relevant data into actionable intelligence. However many organizations are still thinking twice about investing in BI tools when budget time rolls around. Businesses have become masters of collecting data, now the next step is to invest in the proper BI and data analytics tools.

Several BI/Data Visualization tools are free or low cost for an individual user. These include Microsoft Power BI Desktop, MicroStrategy Desktop, and Qlik Sense Desktop. Full disclaimer: free or low-cost use cases are typically limited to the individual or small team. To roll out BI technologies to an enterprise, costs will escalate due to the need for server-side applications (higher license fees) and server infrastructure.

Data Blending

If your organization has multiple sources of data, BI tools can help you prepare and join them for display on a dashboard or visualization without the need for IT. BI tools make it easy to join your data sources together on a common element. For example, let's say you have an extract from your CRM that provides a number of calls by Account and Month. You have another source that provides invoice data (including Account and Month). Data blending allows for easy linking of Account and Month across these two data sets. The BI tool will easily aggregate the invoice data up the Account & Month level and visualize it side by side with the CRM appointment data.

Data blending offers faster and more accurate access to critical data which provides quick insights to business owners. It also allows executives to make better decisions by giving them access to higher quality data intelligence.

Data Visualization

According to a Forbes article “Visualizing data is being incorporated into more business intelligence strategies to help drive dollars back to the bottom line by helping analysts reduce costs or drive productivity.”

Data Visualization is one of the key factors in an organization’s success. Visualizing data can reveal insights that help business owners make informed decisions driven by data. Data Visualization tools allow decision-makers to quickly identify issues and improve response times. Investing in these tools will help simplify all collected data to get the big picture and see details at the same time. The data visualization capabilities are much more advanced and more interactive in BI tools, this enables users to identify new patterns and trends that were most likely looked over when using tabular data in Excel. Use data visualization capabilities to gain a competitive advantage over others not leveraging their data.

Data Wrangling

Data wrangling is the process of converting and mapping raw, messy, and complicated data; cleansing it to make it more valuable and appropriate for advanced tasks such as data analytics and machine learning. It provides precise and actionable data to business analysts in a timely manner.

For example, MicroStrategy provides a data wrangling tool that allows the user to clean and prepare their data before importing it into the tool for analysis. This can include steps like removing white space, eliminating duplicate rows, concatenating columns, or removing unnecessary columns. The steps can be saved into a script that can be reused. For someone who is not adept at writing scripts to do the cleanup, this can be a very handy tool.

High Performance

Companies and enterprises collect a massive volume of data about their customers, sales, and products. The data is often too big and is stored in data lakes that are difficult to access directly by a front-end tool.

Regardless of your data source, if you are having performance issues due to high data volumes, then a BI Tool could give your analysis a big performance boost. Data extracted from your data sources and imported into a BI Tool is typically stored in memory and is highly optimized for analytic queries.

Data Integration with Third-Party tools (ZenDesk, QuickBooks Online, CRM tools, etc)

In addition to integration with relational and big data sources, BI technologies easily connect to sources of data across your enterprise systems (CRM, ERP, Helpdesk, etc.). For example, MicroStrategy supports connectivity to over 100 databases and other information sources. By directly connecting to enterprise systems, you can avoid costly efforts to extract and prepare data for analytics.

D2Strategy provides our clients with the strategies, solutions, and cultural transformations to gain actionable intelligence from their data assets. Our differentiator is our innate ability to truly understand your complex business needs and translate them into the best fit and most cost-effective technology solution. Our data scientists and engineering team uses the latest technologies to deliver innovative analytics, BI, and data warehousing solutions.

Looking to get a competitive advantage? Email Michael Haggerty at mhaggerty@d2strategy.com.