Data driven decisions are a must in today’s world. As technological progress is being made every second, the reliance on BI is also increasing. Now people are moving on to Self Service BI. But the question is: Are they making better decisions as a result of it or are they failing in its implementation? 

Daan Pepijn, in his article at cmswire.com has listed down six critical questions that lead you towards right implementation of Self Service BI in your business. These questions are:

1.       Do you have the right data sources?

2.       Do you have the capability to warehouse your data properly?

3.       What analytics solutions do you have on hand?

4.       How well does your BI solution integrate with existing platforms?

5.       Is your reporting mechanism both powerful and easy to understand?

6.       Does your BI solution enable better compliance?

 
Do ask these questions before implementing your BI solution, because, correct implementation has the power to yield an ROI of $10.66 for every dollar spent.

To know more, please visit the following link:

http://www.cmswire.com/information-management/essential-building-blocks-of-an-effective-self-service-bi-strategy/

Nowadays, organizations are gathering data by integrating Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools with business intelligence (BI) platforms. The difference between CRM and BI is that CRM is a customer database to store information on interactions and sales history while BI provides strategic solutions for overall business functioning, and not just customer sales. But, now the question is how to integrate CRM and BI platforms. Annie Bustos (a valued contributor to Business 2 Community) writes in this article link about some best practices to ensure a smooth integration between these two powerful tools. They are: Understand what you are looking for, populate CRM with good data, create a real-time transfer of data, refine customer segmentations, leverage the data for testing and always ask for help.  

Read more at: http://www.business2community.com/business-intelligence/6-tips-integrating-business-intelligence-solutions-crm-01541585#yZlXhSkAZwpT5ewK.97

We hear a lot of tech words buzzing around like big data, cloud, virtualization, one more term that has been really trending lately is business intelligence. What is business Intelligence? It is a whole suite of software tools and applications that dig deep into the raw data available within an organization, analyze them and provide meaningful interpretations that could help with taking business decisions. While choosing the right BI tool, there must be something that kept in mind. They are:

·         Your Use-Case

·         Backwards Compatibility

·         Scalability

·         Training Costs

Read the complete article here: http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/it-small-business/what-to-look-for-in-a-business-intelligence-tool-73303

As more and more organizations are becoming data driven, the importance of analytic or data insights is increasing. Following are the capabilities that business can adopt to turn data into insights.

Firstly, it is significant to meet business alignment, which means understanding the value a new insight will provide to the business.

Secondly, “data understanding” that is creation of glossaries, dictionary, updating the data and address where the data have been stored.

Thirdly, checking for the required quality (relevance and accuracy) of the data and accordingly seeking new adjustments.

Fourthly, Data centric process takes data as an input and not as an output in the operational processes.

Lastly, in order to establish data-centric process effectively and efficiently. Employees require training to acquire skills to handle data like six sigma quality training.

To read more:http://www.cio.com/article/3041483/analytics/5-critical-success-factors-to-turn-data-into-insight.html

Businesses are shifting to cloud based systems to boost business intelligence. Small to medium business enterprises are now shifting to cloud based applications to enhance their marketing strategies. However, large firms are using these solutions to expand their market. Cloud business intelligence (BI) provides productivity tools and applications that will benefit organizations. These benefits include the speed of deployment speed and implementation of various business apps, scaling up of web applications and the integration of business intelligence apps to enhance business productivity and cost effectiveness. There are many cloud business intelligence solutions available in the market today. To know more about the best cloud business intelligence solutions that you can find in the market today, read the article by Jason Bowden (contributor to Business 2 Community) at: http://www.business2community.com/cloud-computing/best-cloud-business-intelligence-solutions-marketing-analytics-01006959#4THfUeqShLhspv3m.99