BI Tools are in Dire Need of Decision Intelligence! Why So?

It is BI, along with the capabilities of DI, that organizations should consider!

Decision Intelligence has been receiving much buzz lately. McKinsey predicts that 70% of businesses will use decision intelligence in some form or the other by 2030. Gartner predicts Decision Intelligence as one of the top technology trends of 2022. Towards the end of this blog, you will understand why.

As big data and cloud computing adoption continue to skyrocket; organizations are more likely to be data-driven. With new challenges and staying competitive at the epicenter, organizations that once wanted to be a data-first entity are now looking for something beyond being just data-driven.

Business intelligence laid the foundation for enterprises to extract meaningful insights from the pooled organizational data wealth. The popular BI tools among business communities, Power BI, Tableau, etc., need no introduction.

In the business world, data is everything. It helps you understand your customers, tracks your progress, and make better decisions for your company. But to make sense of all that data, you need a good business intelligence (BI) tool.

Over time, companies invest a lot of resources in developing and deploying various tools to enable decision-making. These tools include the generation of business intelligence reports, dashboards, and web-based applications. Business intelligence tools have become integral to the success of a company. The bottom line is that the use of these tools can help transform the way decision-making is organized and the way risk is managed.

As with most other decisions, good decision-making in business can lead to good results. With a careful process of analysis, the analysis of data can help a company make intelligent decisions for its business.  When making decisions, the first step in using Business Intelligence is to define and understand the problem. This may occur to the business in the form of strategic planning, which includes defining the mission and values of the company.

But BI has limitations, according to Wayne Eckerson, founder and principal consultant of Eckerson Group, who spoke during a recent webinar hosted by analytics vendor Sisu.

"BI promised to turn data into insights and action, and it gets us part of the way there," he said. "But we've discovered over the years that it doesn't get us all the way there. It doesn't go that last mile to go from data to insights and action. There's nothing wrong with BI, but it has built-in limitations."

On the other hand, decision intelligence essentially uses AI and machine learning to monitor data.

Every organization has a set of business metrics that are most important to its success. Their data teams can program a decision intelligence platform to perform around-the-clock surveillance on those metrics and the data that drives them. Any time there's a change in those metrics, the decision intelligence tool automatically alerts key stakeholders.

But they don't simply monitor what is happening. Because they can sift through millions of data point combinations in seconds, they can reveal why metrics are changing and suggest the most likely causes, saving analysts time otherwise spent performing root cause analysis.

The Bottom Line

Extracting insights from traditional BI platforms and self-service BI tools has become more complex and irrelevant for many day-to-day decisions with an increasingly complex data landscape. Business teams require analyzing massive amounts of real-time data across channels to take the daily, on-demand micro-decisions that impact an organization's long-term success. Static reports and surface-level dashboards will not suffice in outperforming the competition. To fully capitalize on new opportunities, the time-to-insight and time-to-decision must be near real-time. Organizations must use all the available and relevant data while making business decisions. Analyzing the vast amounts of data along with risk modeling and decision-impacting variables is the need of the hour, and only decision intelligence holds the answers for these.

Business Intelligence along with Decision Intelligence implementation in the decision-making process is crucial for organizations. It is BI, along with the capabilities of DI, that organizations should consider.