Future of Business Intelligence in 2021: Tools, Importance & Trends

The way the business industry operates is changing, or we can say already changed. Due to the pandemic, the surge in remote work culture is unavoidable. Today, businesses are dependent on real-time data more than ever before. They need insightful and visual data to retain their employees and engage their customers.

Right now, businesses need a data storyboard that can help them to make analytical decisions. In short, businesses require business intelligence tools that can collect, process, analyze and report data.

If you are a data-driven company finding your way out during the pandemic, take leverage from business intelligence. Making your business intelligent can makes decision-making 5x faster for you.

This must have raised multiple questions in your mind — what is business intelligence, is BI useful for your company, and importantly, what is the future of business intelligence in 2021. Wait for a second, and keep on reading to know BI a little better.

What Are Business Intelligence Tools?

Wondering what exactly the BI tool is? Well, it is software that can convert raw data into meaningful information to drive profitable business action. It is a suite of software that transforms data into actionable intelligence.

For instance, TrackOlap is a business intelligence tool. Our tools perform data analysis, generate reports, and summarise data in a dashboard. We offer graphs and charts to visually present information to make insightful decisions. Through BI support, we simply throw guesswork out and let businesses only make decisions using accurate historical data.

Importance of Business Intelligence

Helps in creating Key Performance Indicators (KPI) based on historical data.
Set benchmarks for productivity, performance, and other metrics.
BI tools help to recognize market trends and address vivid business problems.
Business intelligence tools offer data visualization that boosts the data quality and decision-making process.
It gives growth push to not only enterprises but also to small and medium-sized companies.

Business Intelligence Examples

Example 1. A bank allows business managers to use BI tools. It helps managers to understand which are more profitable customers and on whom they should work harder. BI tool-free up bank staff from the hassle of generating analytical reports for each department. The tool can automatically generate performance and productivity reports.

Example 2. A company started using BI tools to manage their remote employees. It facilitates managers to know when and for how long their employees are working. It shows ideal time, productive hours and other employee performance reports along with screenshots.

Business Intelligence Trends to Follow in 2021

Data management was already a big topic for the modern business industry. And now, with the work from home set up, it has become even bigger. Therefore, if you want to streamline your remote team's operations, you should watch out for the following business intelligence trends in 2021:

SaaS BI to Support WFH Regime

In the last few months, we have observed that data management has become highly complicated in the WFH setup. We have seen many companies struggling to streamline their operations in a remote environment. Thus, we streamlined time tracking, analytics, and reporting technologies to improve the data management process.

With SaaS BI, organizations get a flexible environment to run their remote operations. It helps users with data analytics at their own work premises, aka, their homes. Businesses can garner all desired reports remotely without any hindrance in the daily work.

Real-data Analytics to Improve Decision Making

Today, data is produced in bulk amounts. Therefore, to instill efficiency in your workflow, you need an analytical engine to process all your data. You need a continuous influx of data to make correct decisions in the prevailing circumstances.

With BI-oriented platforms, you can set automatic event alerts to gain ground control. For example, in remote settings, employers are always worried about the performance of their employees. Here BI tool with application usage feature can track how much time an employee has spent on an app or website in real-time. This way, the employer can send alerts to his or her remote team when they are wasting their time on non-work-related apps or websites.

With BI tools, you can get instant insights and real-time analytics to take timely actions.

Embedded Analytics Is Leading

Embedded analytics is the leading business intelligence trend of the year. It is a cocktail of various analytical elements within business procedures such as dashboards, self-assessment, and reports. Analytics focuses on including reporting and analytic abilities in business operations.

Today, business solutions are heavily dependent upon the embedded analytics, especially in remote environments. For instance, using analytical reports, managers can better monitor the performance of remote workers. Further, it lessens the managers' workload on analytical operations. They can analyze the minute activities of their remote team without disturbing them.

Additionally, automate reports can serve the purpose of self-assessment for your remote employees.

Data Discovery & Visualisation Come Out Stronger

The data discovery might be an old process, but no BI tool is complete without it. The data discovery tools help in yielding valuable data. Data discovery integrated BI tools are highly efficient for small businesses as they can drill down data with minimal IT skills. Using data discovery, trends, and insights extraction become easier for better decision-making.

Once data is discovered, its visual presentation helps in viewing all the vital data segments through a dashboard. It allows business leaders to make informative decisions without diving into a huge pile of information. Data presentation in graphic form can help to spot the anomalies that could affect business operations.

Mobile BI Continuous to Grow

Mobile devices are now an integral part of the business industry. For field forces and remote workers, mobile BI is highly useful. Mobile-oriented BI tools fasten up operations. Such as, sales reps can get clients' digital signatures using mobile-integrated BI tools to confirm sales.

However, creating a responsive mobile layout is a challenge in mobile BI. Now that mobile isn't going anywhere, so our developers have found a way to create responsive mobile BI applications. Today, you can get reports, real-time data-driven alerts, and notifications on your phone. Moreover, employees can also mark their attendance and communicate with their teammates on mobile devices. In short, now your mobile can handle all your BI tools.

Self-service Is Required Today

Do It Yourself is the best mantra to improve the productivity of your WFH employees. Right now, you have physical barriers between you and your workers. Unlike the pre-COVID-19 world, you can't monitor your employees' progress and frequently share input with them. Thus, you need to provide self-assessment BI tools to your employees so they can become self-learners.

The BI software that extracts real-time data and generates multiple reports serves the purpose of self-assessment. You simply have to share auto-generated reports with your remote workers, and they can self-analyze them and improve their performance.

Suppose you have two remote employees in your team — Ajay and Vijay. Ajay's performance has dropped while WFH, but Vijay's performance has improved. Through reports, both Ajay and Vijay can understand the reason behind their performance shift and take actions accordingly.

Here managers' workload reduces a lot, which allows them to focus on other vital business operations.

Cloud-based BI Offers Great Outcome

Cloud BI trend is the future of business intelligence in 2021. The cloud has brought along speed, complication, risk-taking, and budget management solutions for businesses. BI software based on cloud servers allows organizations to securely store and access their data.

When a company has backed all its data on the cloud, remote workers can access the right information anywhere and anytime. With cloud integration, business intelligence tools become more flexible and insightful.

Parting Thoughts

Business intelligence and analytics is a magic wand that converts all data types into valuable information that helps businesses grow. Taking WFH and the surge pandemic in mind, we are convinced that the future of business intelligence in 2021 is very bright. It can harness reporting, analytics, and tracking technologies to give a new perspective to your business to grow remotely.

If you are all set to adopt BI technologies in 2021, we can help you with it. We can customize a dynamic remote tracking software based on the latest BI trends so you can grow despite all odds. Just visit the TrackOlap website to know more about BI tools.