When it comes to managing your business, it’d hard to do so just on gut feelings alone. Even if you have a great sense of how the market is and what sorts of trends consumers may be interested in, without real-time information and hard data to back up your hunches, it’s always going to be difficult to know whether you’re on the right path or are flying blind. Thankfully, most businesses have started to use platforms that allow them to track, measure, and assess different data points, which helps solve this problem for most managers.
That being said, what do you do as a manager if your company is an enterprise and has multiple analytics platforms and dashboards across a variety of departments or software solutions? In these sorts of situations, it can be easy to waste valuable time exporting and importing data from one platform to another, or, even worse, having to put data from different sources into a spreadsheet in order to create the graph or chart you need.
Embedded business intelligence platforms help to address this issue, so managers can earn back a bit of their time and draw conclusions about their enterprise more efficiently. Read on to learn more about what embedded business intelligence is and how it can help your enterprise.
What is embedded business intelligence?
Embedded business intelligence (BI) is a powerful tool that integrates a variety of platforms into one, clean dashboard, rather than keeping them in their disparate software platforms. Also known as embedded analytics, embedded business intelligence tools can take multiple reporting tabs from separate applications and unify them into one, easy-to-use dashboard.
If you rely on typical business intelligence tools such as running reports or creating different data visualizations to send to shareholders, you’ll gain a lot from embedded business intelligence tools. Since embedded business intelligence allows you to bridge different data sets and systems, not only does running analytics become simpler, but it also becomes more powerful, as you can draw on different sources to find out whether something is simply a correlation or has strong evidence for causation.
Keep in mind that big data is becoming more and more important in pretty much every industry. Embedded business intelligence tools streamline the way your company handles data with interactive dashboards that ensure you’re getting actionable insights about your company quicker and more efficiently. Plus, thanks to the power of APIs, it’s easier than ever to customize a BI solution to the tools your company uses.
How does embedded business intelligence help enterprise-level companies?
For busy managers, it’s clear that embedded BI makes it much less time-intensive to perform important analytical work; however, embedded analytics helps managers in other ways, too. For example, since multiple platforms can be unified and integrated into one dashboard, it’s easier to onboard other employees of your company to use BI in their day-to-day workflows, too.
The simpler a platform is to use and understand, the more likely other staff members will be to adopt it. Because embedded analytics take out some of the tediousness of running data reports or visualizations, eliminating steps means that you’re less likely to be the only staff member capable of using a data platform.
It’s also worth noting that savvy managers can increase their profits by adopting embedded business intelligence solutions in consumer-facing products. Just like employees may struggle to use a more complicated system, customers want a clean, simple, and efficient experience, too.
If you want to expand your revenue streams, you can consider charging for embedded reporting tools or reports in the products you develop for customers. This can lead to increased value in your existing software solutions, ultimately drawing a new crowd to your product or service thanks to the power offered by business intelligence tools.