Business intelligence for small business: Is your company ready for the BI revolution?

What could your small or midsize company do with the right business intelligence?

A lot—thanks to the new cheaper, faster, AI-driven business intelligence tools entering the market every day. Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) can use business intelligence platforms to predict customer behavior, be the first to market with new products and services and automate processes like never before.

Advanced data analytics that previously cost millions of dollars in custom development is now available for the cost of a license, and user-friendly AI interfaces make parsing data so simple, employees throughout your organization can manage them. Businesses of all sizes are seizing the opportunity. In fact, Straits Research predicts the global business intelligence market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14.98% every year, to $116.25 billion by 2033.

What is business intelligence for small business?

Business intelligence helps SMB leaders turn data into succinct, timely, and actionable insights. Instead of digging through spreadsheets, BI tools pull together information from across your business—sales, finance, operations—and present it in easy-to-understand dashboards and reports. For IT managers and C-suite leaders, it means faster decisions, better resource planning, and a clearer view of what’s working and what’s not. It’s about making data work for you, not the other way around.

What does BI do?

From the advanced modeling and interactive dashboards of Microsoft Power BI[LH1]  to the BI-connectivity to Google tools in Google Looker Studio to the proactive monitoring and action plans you get from a multi-agented tool like Tableau Pulse, big changes are coming for the world of data management. Is your company ready?

How the business intelligence market will change in the coming years—and what that means for SMBs

Soon, the benefits of business intelligence for small business will become interwoven into all our apps and everything we do. So much so, that it will eventually be like Wi-Fi—something that’s always on, enabling our work.

You’ll notice big shifts, including the following:

• Self-service BI will go mainstream, allowing nontechnical users to generate their own insights with natural language interfaces and simplified dashboards.
• Analytics will be embedded in everyday tools like M365 and other platforms, so your insights will appear natively, where the work is done. No switching between apps is needed.
• SMBs will be able to afford enterprise-grade BI, thanks to a flood of new cloud-based, subscription tools, giving them the ability to access predictive analytics, anomaly detection and automated insights.
• Data governance will become critical, as companies will develop more rules around data access, catalogs, governance frameworks and metrics standardization.

Every time new technology emerges, industry participants breathlessly expound on how their technology will “change the way we do X, Y, or Z.” It’s easy to get jaded.

But I’d argue that BI really is that elusive “killer app” that will allow us all to work harder and smarter. It has the power to be the great equalizer, leveling the playing field for the small and medium-sized companies that are competing against larger, better-resourced rivals. Is your business ready to seize the opportunity BI represents?

Business intelligence for SMBs: Lay the groundwork for success

Now is the time to think about the types of documents and data your business handles. This is a crucial first step in getting started with business intelligence. Tighten your identity access management and establish strong data governance for your small business to mitigate the cybersecurity risks of BI.

Consider the types of data currently flowing through your organization. When employees have AI and BI tools that can surface every line of data, who should have access to which information? Section your data off so only employees at certain levels or in certain departments can search those data sets. Also consider clearly tagging old or outdated information, to ensure it doesn’t corrupt new BI searches.

Improved information access should also come with stricter cybersecurity and data governance.  Set up zero-trust protocols that continuously monitor authentication during every user’s work sessions. Even if your organization isn’t ready to move to advanced AI tools, you’ll improve your governance and build the foundation for your future success with BI.

BI use cases for SMBs: How to use business intelligence platforms to drive future investment

Before you make an investment in new business intelligence platforms, your company must first ask: how do we want to use it? Inspiration abounds. Microsoft is amassing a use case library for its Microsoft Power BI product that’s now up to more than 700 real-world case studies.

Before you pull the trigger on the business intelligence tools, ask these questions:

• How many licenses will the business need, and which employees will have access?
• What types of data and documents will this app have access to?
• Will broader access to this data across the organization create regulatory issues, such as HIPAA or GDPR data-handling violations?
• How will the addition of BI tools affect our cybersecurity monitoring and documentation?

And perhaps most important: What are the specific BI use cases that will drive the most value for my company? Also, how do I amortize the potential ROI over time? Here are some of the areas where I think we’ll be seeing the best use cases for business intelligence in the near future.

Predictive analytics that foster improved decision making

BI can capture where you are. But business intelligence tools are most useful to anticipate what your customers need next. Take Ecolab, for example, a company that’s a global leader in water, hygiene, and energy technologies. It harnessed generative AI to analyze customer data and predict sales trends, significantly improving customer engagement and sales. It also used BI tools to identify its top-performing plants, identify what made these sites more successful, and develop action plans for their other plants to pull them up to the same level.

Automated processes that are rooted in business intelligence

Some of the biggest names in technology have been using their own customized BI programs for years.

For instance, Amazon uses machine learning to forecast demand for more than 400 million products, with predictive models that help them automate inventory placement and logistics so they can fulfill their two-day delivery promise. Similarly, UPS’s ORION system uses AI to plan delivery routes—making big gains in speed and overhead. Saving just one mile per driver per day can save the company $50 million a year.

These major companies invested millions in their proprietary business intelligence solutions. But as BI and generative AI merge and expand, complex systems will become available at license, fully customizable and scaled for your budget. What kinds of automations could you render on a smaller scale that would move your business forward?

Better personalization for employees and customers

Chances are, your company has been gathering better, deeper information about your customers’ behavior for some time now. Now, AI and BI tools enable you to respond to that behavior in real time, improving the customer experience while you boost sales.

A good example of this is UPS’s My Choice alerts, a free, AI-powered system that lets residential customers decide where, how, and when their products get delivered.

Netflix, of course, is the vanguard of the new entertainment streaming future using AI and BI. Today, the company is not just parsing data to serve up personalized recommendations to customers. It uses that data to determine the likelihood of a show or film’s success, which new projects to green light, and which personalized ads to send to what viewers.

Let our business intelligence advisers inspire you

Now is the time to think about the data governance structures and software that can help take your company to the next level. Developing a BI strategy for your SMB can seem daunting, which is why our team provides expert IT support for BI implementation. Integris can provide both business intelligence solutions, and the business intelligence advisers you’ll need to run the platforms safely.