make a better product by understanding customer behavior,.From there, data takes on new importance by helping you Modern companies have a lot of data, but they can’t use it well.īusiness intelligence platforms solve this problem by helping your company manage and understand what’s going on with those terabytes of data. Add that to Forrester’s finding that “between 60% and 73% of all data within an enterprise goes unused for analytics” and a pretty clear picture emerges: In 2016, the International Data Group (IDG) found that the average company managed 162.9 terabytes of data. Nowadays, companies manage a lot more data than 19th-century bankers, which makes it more difficult to achieve the “business intelligence” Devens described. The term “business intelligence” was first used by Richard Millar Devens in his 1865 page-turner Cyclopædia of Commercial and Business Anecdotes to describe how a banker gained a competitive advantage by gathering and acting on information before other bankers could. Utilizing data more effectively has always been the core purpose of business intelligence, but BI platforms make this process much more efficient, resulting in a totally new relationship with data.
When implemented well, modern business intelligence platforms make your company’s data usable. Why Are Business Intelligence Platforms Important? The purpose of BI platforms is to help companies compete in today’s data-saturated world by turning their data into a competitive advantage. It serves as the backbone of a company’s business intelligence strategy, which is how a company uses information to make better decisions.īut “better decisions” may be putting it a bit lightly. A business intelligence (BI) platform is technology that helps businesses gather, understand, and visualize their data.