What is a Business Intelligence (BI) Platform?

Understanding a Business Intelligence (BI) Platform

A business intelligence (BI) platform is a technology-driven system that helps businesses collect, analyze, and visualize their data. It serves as the backbone of a company’s business intelligence strategy to help leaders make better and more informed business decisions.

The prime focus of BI platforms is to empower businesses to compete in today's data-driven environment by leveraging data and capturing insights.

Why Are Business Intelligence Platforms Important?

Modern business intelligence tools make the data in your firm usable when properly integrated. Business intelligence's main goal has always been to use data more efficiently, but BI platforms greatly increase the efficiency of this process, resulting in a completely new relationship with data.

Today, businesses generate a lot of data from different sources but they struggle to effectively use it.

Business intelligence tools let your firm manage and understand what is happening with those large data volumes to address challenges. From there, data plays a significant role by helping you in:

Creating better products by understanding customer behavior,

Serving customers better by learning their needs and shopping preferences,

Running a business efficiently by spotting potential issues.

With the right BI platform, all of this is possible on the go, providing you a competitive advantage because your decisions are accurate, quick, and most importantly based on your organization’s data - not anyone else’s.

How Have Business Intelligence Platforms Evolved?

Business intelligence has significantly influenced businesses in the last two decades. Let's read about how it has revolutionized the way businesses perform:

Cloud-based Business Intelligence platforms

Previously, businesses had to manually install business intelligence on servers that they owned and operated. With the advent of upgraded technology, a lot of BI tools are "cloud-based," indicating they are hosted online and are accessible via web browsers. You can use business intelligence from any location if you have a laptop and internet connectivity. When BI platforms started using a subscription-based pricing model, like much other software as a service (SaaS) providers, this transition to a cloud-based infrastructure also coincided at the same time. For modern software, you pay significantly less each month or year than you would if you made a single payment.

There is no longer need of buying a server and hiring a team to manage your BI solution. Instead, you can just sign up for a free trial and give it a try.

Self-service Business Intelligence platforms

One of the upcoming major challenges that BI solutions must address is self-service. According to a recent BI Survey, self-service is the fifth most significant BI trend, closely followed by related trends like "data prep by business users." Self-service BI holds significance for a sound reason: if you want to foster a culture of data democratization, you need a user-friendly BI platform.

This paves the path for agile business intelligence, a type of BI system that is easily adaptable to changes in your business and the marketplace. Your BI system becomes flexible and can develop quickly to cater to the changing needs of your teams because all of your data is democratized and isn't bottlenecked through one or two teams.

To learn more about self-service business intelligence solutions, please get in touch with Experts at Polestar Solutions.

READ MORE: Top 6 Business Intelligence And Analytics Trends For 2020