Jane always spends the equivalent of a few days per month compiling monthly Oversight Committee Reports. These reports always included several different types and inputting key elements into pre-formatted spreadsheets and documents for distribution. Her financial institution implemented a change in approach to client management and how it handled responsibility assignments.
Relationship assignments had always been done by feel. Experience was factored in, and more experienced managers were given the seemingly more important relationships. After instituting this change, something about the responsibility assignments didn’t feel quite right.
Jane started to find answers. She wanted to see the number of accounts and total relationship value for each relationship manager. These numbers were then compared to the average per relationship manager. This uncovered inconsistencies where the number of relationships and account values didn’t always line up with importance, and some lesser experienced managers were handling far more accounts and total value than others.
The balance was off.
Armed with this new information, her institution reviewed assignments again, and they worked to better balance the workload across all relationship managers. Perceived importance and the complexity due to number of accounts and value were all considered in rebalancing client relationships, resulting in better customer service.
Defining Business Intelligence
Business Intelligence, or “BI”, is an increasingly popular term these days, but what is it really?
The term, ”Business Intelligence”, is generally defined as the processes, tools, and other methods to capture and analyze data, with the goal of deriving better answers to key questions. In the end, Business Intelligence ultimately helps an organization make better decisions.
In the example above, only when the data was connected in new ways, Jane was able to find where a process wasn’t efficient and create a solution.
Business Intelligence provides another view of what goes on behind the curtain and can point you to processes or products that can improve an organization’s performance. BI tools can capture data from within a single business unit or from across an entire organization, and help uncover data relationships that may not have been known or not previously considered relevant. This discovery allows you to explore leads and potentially devise new processes, consider new products to offer, or enter new markets altogether.
There are millions of terabytes of data in the world that contain many secrets to be unlocked. In your own business, you have gigabytes, or terabytes, of information waiting to have their secrets revealed. Implementing a BI solution is the key to unlocking the code to those secrets. Providing stakeholders with the tools to visualize and analyze data leads to a deeper understanding of the business and a more efficient and profitable outcome for all.
How Business Intelligence Works
The human brain can process large amounts of complex data much easier and faster than reading text and scanning columns of numbers and text in spreadsheets. Business Intelligence takes the information traditionally viewed in reports and converts that information into charts and other visuals to emphasize the scale and relationships that different data points have with your goals.
Visualizations can be simple pie charts, column, bar charts, or single Indicators, but can also display complex relationships through Polar/Radar charts. Indicators are designed to show a single number you’re tracking, like Total Market Value or Total Fee Revenue. These can be compared to a goal or target and further color-coded to let you know if you’re on track or behind in achieving a goal.
Insights does this work for you by processing your data and performing the analysis to produce a vast array of visualizations that cover metrics critical to your business. Each view is comprised of multiple widgets that work together so that as you explore different scenarios (variables) they adjust with each other to provide different perspectives of the same data. This is all done to help you make better decisions faster and with more confidence.
Why Business Intelligence Matters
All decisions result in one of three main outcomes – success, failure, or maintain. There are varying degrees of each of these main results, but when push comes to shove, all businesses ultimately desire to make decisions that provide a path toward success. Business Intelligence does this by managing potential risks of any decision and identifying potential mistakes more quickly so that corrective action can be taken before it is too late.
Business Intelligence tools have access to details about your processes, customers, and products and help bring trends in those areas to the forefront. When analyzed, these trends can point to current efficiencies to build upon, as well as potential dead weight holding you back. The more aware you are of these trends, the more effective you will be in making decisions.
The better and more informed your decision making, the more likely you are to stay ahead of the competition and keep your business on the path to achieving its goals. Reduced risks and higher process efficiency usually lead to higher customer satisfaction and increased revenue. Who doesn’t want that?
