Total Views: 818
Table of Content
Blog Summary:
A Business Intelligence Strategy is paramount for any business. It helps make data-driven decisions by organizing, analyzing, and transforming vast amounts of raw data into actionable insights. If your business doesn’t have one, this blog will explore how a well-executed BI strategy addresses specific challenges inspired by real-life cases, essential components, and steps to build it.
Table of Content
Business Intelligence is not new. In 1865, a famous author, Richard Miller Devens, recalled its first-ever use case in his book of business anecdotes. It was a banker who collected information on market trends before his competitors. However, the actual term was coined in 1958 by the researcher Hans Peter Luhn.
From the 1960s to the 1990s, data warehousing evolved into enterprise solutions with static reports and dashboards. It allowed businesses to consolidate their data from multiple sources and generate reports for analysis.
However, these solutions had limited flexibility for real-time insights because their Business Intelligence Strategy focused on historical data and structural reporting. Since 2000, modern BI tools have emerged that offer real-time analytics with cloud capabilities and Artificial Intelligence.
According to Market Research Future, the business intelligence market was valued at USD 33.12 billion in 2024 and is expected to reach USD 78.42 billion by 2032. The growth rate over the period offers businesses a great opportunity to tap into this ever-growing industry by building a custom BI strategy.
Keep reading ahead as we take you on a journey of how a BI strategy can be a powerful source to get real-time insights and predict your success.
In simple words, BI is similar to having a smart assistant help your business turn data into useful information.
Business intelligence enables you to hunt for treasure from various sources and puts all the pieces together. It then stores all the collected data in one place, called a data warehouse, for easier access and analysis. By looking for patterns and trends, it presents a complex story in easily understandable formats to make better decisions.
Your business can use this information to build a business intelligence strategy, which is a well-defined plan that outlines how it will use data analysis tools to make decisions. Let’s understand through an example:
Suppose you have a travel business and want to build a business intelligence strategy to utilize the collected data. The strategy would gather new data points and increase efficiency in operations, customer experience, marketing, and pricing.
Here’s a checklist of how your BI strategy would look like when you partner with a business intelligence company:
✔️Collect data from key sources like hotel and flight bookings, website bounce rates, social media, customer reviews, market trends, and competitor pricing.
✔️Set key measurable business goals, like improving booking conversion rates by 30% and boosting customer retention by 20% with personalized travel offers.
✔️Analyze customer behavior using BI tools like Microsoft Power BI, Amazon Redshift, and Tableau to process and uncover key insights. (Trending winter and summer destinations, demographics for last-minute trips).
✔️Use BI dashboards to visualize data insights and understand trends, such as seasonal and regional bookings and popular travel packages among age groups.
✔️Optimize marketing and sales strategies to prepare personalized plans based on insights, such as a surge in beach destination bookings in summer.
Having a business intelligence strategy that aligns with your business objectives allows you to understand customer behavior and anticipate future trends. In the next section, we’ll discuss the main components of a BI strategy.
Owing to a data-rich environment, your business needs a structured strategy that can turn a lot of scattered raw data into actionable insights. A BI strategy offers a structured way to organize your resources and time to maximize your operational efficiency.
However, building the architecture of this strategy is a combination of many crucial elements that collectively define how your business wants to use the data (resources) and make informed decisions. Let’s understand through the same example of a travel business:
Data sources are your raw materials, setting the foundation for your unique BI strategy. This strategy includes collecting data from customer bookings, website clicks, social media apps, and databases to identify and gather relevant data.
Example: You want to create a BI strategy for flight bookings during peak season so that customers book more flights. You can utilize business intelligence services like identifying data sources for customer preferences for specific destinations.
Storing this data would make it easier to use it effectively since it would be scattered across multiple platforms. Hence, a data warehouse is a secure central storage place where you can store your data before building a BI strategy.
Example: For your travel business, you can create a central database to store all the data collected. It would be your data warehouse or a cloud vault containing all the information related to partner airlines, flight and hotel bookings, seasonality trends, reviews, social media, and surveys.
After collecting and storing data, it’s important to combine each piece of data for integration with other business intelligence solutions. This serves as a blueprint for performing real-time analysis through analytical tools and techniques like data mining, machine learning, predictive analytics, and statistical analysis.
Example: With integration, you wouldn’t only know someone booked a mountain destination in Switzerland but also the activities they spent time browsing before deciding.
Using predictive analytics, you can also analyze booking trends over the last 5 years and understand the months when the resorts get maximum bookings.
Last but not least, before making a decision, it’s important to present and visualize the data through dashboards and graphs. Based on the insights, you can improve operational efficiency and find new opportunities by monitoring the performance indicators.
Example: For your travel business, you can utilize business intelligence services like dashboards that show peak travel times, preferences, and revenue breakdowns. If expedition packages are growing, you can offer customized adventure tours next year.
Similarly, if family adventure tours show a spike in summer, you can tailor your package accordingly.
Transform raw data into actionable insights and revolutionize your decision-making processes.
Now that you have chosen the right technology, earning the highest return on investment is possible only by having the right strategy. But first, ask yourself three questions:
Then, follow these steps. We have taken the same example of a travel business:
Identify the specific but measurable goals. For example, you have set goals as:
What to Focus On: Data from website analytics, booking data, itineraries, and seasonal patterns will show the most visited pages by potential customers to optimize your offers.
Your business intelligence strategy should be tailored to increase bookings during the off-season by analyzing their booking patterns and pricing trends.
Once you have chosen the data sources, select tools like Microsoft Power BI, Tableau, Zoho Analytics, Looker, Qlik, Oracle, IBM, etc. At this step, you can also choose the following integrations with your business intelligence solutions:
What to Focus On: Based on the tools, set your KPIs and metrics to evaluate the success. These could range from the number of visitors converted into bookings, revenue per available room, flight occupancy rates, and travel package sales.
Create a structured framework to define how you would handle data accurately, reliably, and ethically. You can assign roles like a data steward to oversee booking preferences to help establish data quality standards.
What to Focus On: Ensure the data is compliant with GDPR and consumer privacy when collecting passport details and payment information. Implement data management tools like CRM & ERP and train employees using real-life scenarios of privacy breaches due to mishandling customer data.
The final step is an ongoing process where you use the collected data and visualize it to make informed decisions. Based on the insights gathered from implementing business intelligence services, you can either launch a new promotional offer, target a specific customer segment, or adjust prices.
What to Focus On: Create visually appealing and interactive dashboards that show customer behavior, top destinations, and peak travel periods. This could include holiday promotions, high-value customers, and common complaints to monitor and improve your marketing efforts.
Leveraging BI is quite similar to organizing data to make smarter decisions. Whether you’re tracking operational expenses by gathering all data from bank statements or collecting customer data to build an app – BI is in effect.
Here are some of the most beneficial ways you can leverage it, along with some real-life examples:
Business intelligence services enable your business to pool data from various departments and processes to gather important insights. For example, if you have an Over-The-Top (OTT) platform, you can analyze viewer behavior, such as watching histories and peak streaming times.
With these, you can personalize recommendations and predict trending content by segmenting customers. It also helps you determine insights on content performance to cancel or renew shows.
The Case of Netflix: Netflix, a popular OTT platform, utilized business intelligence solutions to understand viewing habits by tracking when and which type of content people watch and what they skip. This helped Netflix create new content and personalize recommendations, becoming the driving force behind 80% of the viewed content.
Running a successful business requires balancing customer satisfaction and internal operations. For example, if you have a manufacturing and retail beverage business, you can utilize BI to analyze inventory levels and sales data.
You can also track machine performance and energy consumption to predict maintenance needs and minimize downtimes by optimizing schedules, shipping times, and distribution channels.
The Case of Coca-Cola: Coca-Cola, a well-known retail beverage company, utilized Microsoft Power BI to simplify its vast distribution network and customer interactions. With real-time reporting, they were able to react faster to market changes and improve operational efficiency by 60%.
With the right business intelligence strategy, your business can gain real-time visibility into financial performance by analyzing revenue streams, profitability metrics, and operational costs.
For example, you have a technology company operating in multiple locations and segments. BI can help you determine gross margins, net incomes, and operating expenses to optimize cash flow strategies.
The Case of Amazon: Amazon, a multinational technology company, uses its own BI tools, such as Amazon Redshift and QuickSight, to manage supply chain operations.
Analyzing shopping patterns and behavior predicts which products will need to be stocked soon. Their chosen business intelligence solutions helped them increase their sales by 29% in a year with a smart inventory management system and customized marketing.
BI tools can help boost customer retention by delving deeper into customer behavior, such as buying history, and creating better marketing campaigns. For example, if you have a retail snacks and beverage outlet, you can use BI data to offer discounts on frequently bought items.
You can also track peak hours to optimize store staff and reduce waiting times. By monitoring stock levels and adjusting offers, you can ensure popular items are always available and increase customer satisfaction.
The Case of Starbucks: Starbucks is a popular retail outlet that implemented Tableau for BI. They built their offers by estimating when a product would be in demand. Their loyalty program helped them increase revenue by 11% in 2019.
Optimize operations and drive growth opportunities with a proven data analysis approach.
As much as a BI strategy involves data-based thinking, it’s also a delicate combination of hardware and software. It’s a set of approaches and processes that can often go wrong if not properly implemented, leading to challenges in finding insights.
Here are some of the challenges your business faces and best practices to overcome them:
Inaccurate data can undermine insights because integrating data from various business intelligence solutions, such as spreadsheets, databases, and third-party systems, is complex. This could also increase the implementation costs.
Best Practices: Get insights from the BI team working with the current processes. Consider using a Zachman Framework to structure your tech architecture and help you choose the right assets and processes.
BI systems are becoming more advanced, leading to an increase in demand for skills in data analytics, ML, and visualization tools. However, businesses often need more such skills, resulting in timely reports and accurate data interpretation.
Best Practices: Internal upskilling and training programs with certification and workshops can help employees gain more knowledge. Self-service BI tools are also effective for non-technical users who want to generate reports without relying solely on specialists.
While self-service business intelligence services empower multiple departments to gain insights, the conclusions could be more consistent. It can lead to more confusion instead of having a unified plan of action because human bias can often become a hurdle.
Best Practices: Use AI-driven analysis with ML models to minimize personal or cognitive biases and ensure data is gathered from diverse sources. Implement a cross-functional review process and regularly audit the data collection processes and models.
Modern businesses have complex datasets that need to be properly acquired, organized, and analyzed. The decision-making process is made difficult by the huge volumes of data that provide inaccurate, incorrect, and partial information.
A BI strategy can solve this problem only if it is effective, accurate, and timely. While many BI software platforms can make operational decisions effectively, it is difficult to present the depth and speed.
At this point, businesses might have many questions about how to achieve their goals effectively. The answers to your questions lie in having full knowledge of your business, which allows you to make better judgments.
Moon Technolabs is a business intelligence company that can solve all your questions with a custom strategy and a BI team. With your ideas and our agile plan, we help you build a structure with a feedback loop, secure data access, and highly organized formats. Contact us for a free consultation.
Without a BI strategy in place, your business is like a ship navigating through uncharted waters. Without the precise data BI offers, the ship’s crew would rely on experiences and intuition to find their way — methods that could lead to costly missteps.
However, with BI, that same ship is equipped with advanced navigation systems, which provide real-time updates and accurate predictions, ensuring smoother sailing. The power of BI is in its ability to transform raw data into actionable insights that can guide companies toward smarter, data-driven decisions.
As businesses continue to embrace machine learning and AI-powered Business Intelligence tools, predicting future trends becomes easier to improve productivity and enhance profitability.
01
02
03
Jayanti Katariya is the CEO of Moon Technolabs, a fast-growing IT solutions provider, with 18+ years of experience in the industry. Passionate about developing creative apps from a young age, he pursued an engineering degree to further this interest. Under his leadership, Moon Technolabs has helped numerous brands establish their online presence and he has also launched an invoicing software that assists businesses to streamline their financial operations.
Submitting the form below will ensure a prompt response from us.
We refine our expertise to deliver innovative business solutions.
500 N Michigan Avenue, #600, Chicago IL 60611
13500 Long Is Dr, Pflugerville, TX 78660, USA
C-105, Ganesh Meridian, S.G. Highway, Ahmedabad, GJ 380060
France“ I highly recommend Moon Technolabs as the quality of service is wonderful. We have hired this company to develop the product based on some complex & technical issues. We get the best quality services as compared with others in the market. Huge Thanks to Moon Technolabs as the team is always ready to give the solution all time.”
USA“ Moon Technolabs is a pioneer in the WebRTC based project as they have fixed complicated segments of the module by fulfilling different product lines by providing 24X7 customer support. We really recommended Moon Technolabs as they are able to develop products as per the module deadline and project timeline.”
Germany“I am happy to recommend Moon Technolabs for their app development services. They successfully developed apps for me, and I am highly satisfied with the overall outcomes. The development team has swiftly addressed the issues with responsive and effective communication to understand the requirement quickly and actively resolve the back-and-forth problems that arose...”
USA“Moon Technolabs is the best company that provides advanced apps and websites development services in the USA and Europe. I am a newbie to develop my app with an external team. I am really happy to work with them as I am not that much mobile apps user. Here, the team and specially the CEO of Moon Technolabs helps me to let me know about the benefits of my app to generate revenue....”
