The Impact of Business Intelligence on IT: Part 1, Freeing IT Resources

In this article, we’ll look at five of the processes that could act as bottlenecks to the flow of critical information in your business and how a shift in ownership from IT to integrated BI can free them up.

Importance of IT Resources

Your internal IT team is vital to the health, survivability, and profitability of your organization. Nothing we’ll say here today can dispute that. However, your IT resources may well be spread too thin. By shifting some data-oriented tasks and responsibilities to BI, and at least partially to an automated BI solution, you can preserve your crucial IT resources for what they do best.

The Challenges and Bottlenecks Faced by IT

Business intelligence tools provide hugely valuable data and analytics resources that help you make strategic decisions more reliably and more quickly. But IT cannot remain responsible for BI and tend to their other duties as well.

5 Ways BI Can Help to Address These Challenges  

Let’s look at five such bottlenecks you can remove by assigning ownership of the problem to a specialized BI solution instead. The five bottlenecks include: 

1. Accessing Information Anytime, Anywhere
2. Data Curation
3. Reporting in The Big Picture
4. Knowing the Real ROI of Your Marketing Efforts
5. Keeping your Competitive Intelligence Both Secure and Accessible

1. Accessing Information Anytime, Anywhere

Many organizations find that the most important part of the data they must deliver to their people in the field or the meeting room is up-to-date BI data. A good, well-integrated BI solution can handle this all on its own, with support offered by the solution provider. That means your limited in-house IT resources can be redirected to other priorities.

2. Data Curation

Some of the most challenging tasks for in-house IT resources remain those associated with data curation – collecting, analyzing, and controlling access to important data. A powerful, modern BI solution can do this much more efficiently than older bespoke systems, and dramatically faster than humans can do ‘by hand.’

3. Reporting in The Big Picture

Your IT people are probably brilliant at generating reports – of certain types. Details, numbers, flow… all of this is a few typed commands away. But deciding which information needs to be in the report to give a realistic, useful ‘big picture’ of the company at any given moment is often beyond even the best IT team’s remit. Once again, a high-quality automated BI system can compile real-time marketing feedback, financial reports, and sales figures. If you want to see different data displayed in a different format, the software can generate a new report in seconds, not hours.

4. Knowing the Real ROI of Your Marketing Efforts

Your marketing people, hand in hand with your IT team, could provide amazing insight into your marketing efforts… back when traditional marketing methods were used. But radio and even TV ads are ever more eclipsed by email, AdWords campaigns, and social media analytics tools. You’ll find a well-integrated BI solution can tell you a great deal more, with much more accuracy.

5. Keeping your Competitive Intelligence Both Secure and Accessible

In the past, the juggling act of keeping your most crucial data in the hands of those who need it to work for you and out of the hands of anyone else has been your IT team’s job. Today, even the largest and best-equipped IT departments are putting more and more of these decisions into the ‘hands’ of automated systems. But duplication is itself a security flaw. This is another task that can be done by a properly integrated BI solution better, cheaper, and more reliably than your in-house IT team.

Conclusion

Businesses today collect, process, store, and analyze more data from more sources than ever before. But the sheer complexity and volume of this data can easily become a burden for your IT people.  With embedded BI and analytics solutions like ours, these problems can be eliminated.

Click below to read the second and third parts of this blog series!

The Image of Business Intelligence on IT: Part 2, Reducing Data Requests

The Impact of Business Intelligence on IT: Part 3, Helping CIOs Optimize

Kristi Carignan

Kristi Carignan is an award-winning freelance writer with over 20 years of professional experience supporting global agencies and brands. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Classical Literature and Economics from the University of British Columbia. Her hobbies include making connections on LinkedIn, home renovation, interior design, travel and sleep.