Business Intelligence Tools: Steering in the Right Direction

Despite the rampant growth of new data, constantly evolving technologies and the digitalisation of entire sectors, there are a few facets of business that will never be eliminated entirely: volatility, uncertainty and risk.

But with business intelligence tools, you can keep your organisation on the right track and reduce the inherent risks of day-to-day operations. Here’s how.

A complete, all-in-one business tool

When seeking out a business intelligence tool to adopt in your organisation, you’ll want one with speed, agility and flexibility, so it provides a return on your investment.

With IBM Planning Analytics, for example, you get all those things and more, leading to an all-in-one performance management solution that can be deployed either on-site or in the cloud for operational security.

In addition to its user-friendly and intuitive framework, it provides insights to help both large and small businesses drive greater process efficiency. This is essential in a fast-paced and competitive industry, where the process of analysing data quickly is vital in order to expedite decision-making and take business-critical actions.

The keys to exceptional business intelligence tools

There are plenty of business intelligence tools on the market, but not all are created equal. In order to derive the most value from your tool, you’ll want to ensure it offers:

• Speed and flexibility: You’ll want a tool that allows you to hit the ground running while also leaving room for you to build out your deployment as and when needed.
• Agility: Your business intelligence tool needs to adapt to your changing needs so it can accommodate all your budgets, plans and forecasts even as business conditions fluctuate.
• Foresight: The ability to visualise insights from both internal and external datasets. You can leverage those insights to anticipate future trends and drive your business growth.

Benefits from installing the right tool

Whether you’re a chief data officer, innovation executive or simply a jack-of-all-trades in your organisation, you need to conduct your due diligence when sourcing an appropriate business intelligence tool.

Choose IBM Planning Analytics, for example, and you’ll find it works at an inter-departmental level to streamline time-consuming activities like creating plans, budgets and forecasts in a customisable analytics environment.

Business leaders can engage with fast and flexible ‘what if’ scenario modelling to assist them in important decision-making. And perhaps most important for the wider business team, natural-language searching allows even the most inexperienced users to perform searches and make queries for powerful analysis.

To learn more about how a business intelligence tool like IBM Planning Analytics can take your enterprise to the next level, contact Octane Software Solutions today.