Businesses today are more focused on customers. And rightly so, because customers, no matter where they are, are empowered by technology. They can easily find out more about your products and services, their benefits, and their weaknesses. They can also find out the same things about your competitors just as easily. They can even compare businesses, products and services using their own criteria.
This is the reason why customers will ultimately have the sole power to decide if your business flourishes and grows, or if you will have to shut it down soon. At present, enterprises would really need to be focused on their customers in order to succeed and that is the reason why business owners need updated data and analytics in order to give customers the most satisfaction.
That realization and understanding has paved the way for the rise of business intelligence (BI), as well as the use of big data, data mining and analytics to help businesses make sense of raw data and assist in creating effective solutions.
Business intelligence is nothing new, but the old techniques and strategies used are no longer enough in today’s business climate and certainly not fit for businesses of the future. Business owners would need to use agile software development techniques to complement old business intelligence strategies to get faster results and become more adaptable.
Aside from agile BI, you would also need big data in order to get the fastest as well as the most relevant and useful insights that you can use to serve your customers.
In short, your business intelligence needs to adapt to changing business climates, and evolve with improving agility, as well as keep up with the trends in data processing. All of these help shape data warehousing’s future.
Traditional BI is not enough for today’s businesses to succeed
For organizations that already have old business intelligence deployed, you should know that older applications might not be able to cope up with the demands of customers. These include:
- Not being able to accurately measure their BI’s ROI. New deployments benefit from having methodologies that measure ROI and knowing the value of BI.
- Not being able to correctly manage operational risk, be scalable or solve latency problems.
- Having difficulties with integration and migration.
- Poor data quality.
Setting up new or upgrading BI deployments that includes big data and agile BI can help you grow your business and become more competitive. Big data helps you get information from a variety of sources while agile BI makes your business intelligence more adaptable and responsive. Your business can now easily get the best quality of actionable data that can lead to quality insights. What’s more, you are using the same processes, people and technology while also becoming more attuned to your customers’ needs, manage complexity and growth, and enhance collaboration.
This new BI strategy will need new data warehousing to eliminate the wasted resources in data duplication and movement. This new data warehousing will be defined by several factors, including:
- Agility – Data mining, analysis, business intelligence and other processes needs to be a team effort; and collaboration is a key ingredient for success. You would see cross-functional groups working together rather than individual departments working alone and in silos. This means that the old way of storing data in a single server will not be feasible.
- Cloud Computing – Using the cloud to store data is gaining traction among individuals and businesses. The cloud is one of the biggest factors in the future of data warehousing because it allows you access from a variety of sources without data duplication and movement, as well as store a huge amount of data.
- Data from the Internet of Things (IoT) – The Internet of Things is helping businesses get data from different sources that were not easy or possible before. That means that enterprises will have access to a new kind of data, including streaming and real time information.
How does new data warehousing solve your problem?
New data warehousing solutions give businesses simpler yet more powerful way to stream data, get real time data and incorporate these into historic data.
In the old way of doing business intelligence, BI was treated as a separate activity done by a separate department. Data analytics were limited to historical data. That is simply not the way to do business today. To correct this, you need to implement new data warehousing that would give you these solutions:
- Streaming data from the Internet of Things. IoT is a game changer as businesses, customers and other users often store data using different devices – yet they are able to share them easily.
- Data lakes. A data lake is one kind of storage repository that can accommodate huge amounts of raw data. Unlike a hierarchical data repository, a data lake does not store data in folders or files. Instead, it uses flat architecture. Data lakes will keep the data in its raw format until you need it.
- Consolidating fragmented data. Today’s data warehousing solutions allow you to pull and collect data for analysis from different organizations, departments and sources. This helps give way to agility and collaboration, while also delivering faster results.
These are the benefits you get from data warehousing that could help you get better data analytics and business insights by expanding on historical data with streaming up to the minute data. But you should not stop there. You should start merging activities and departments that will help give you more coherent business insights, encourage collaboration, and continuously improve, adapt and evolve your business intelligence.
Data warehousing is one of Four Cornerstone’s database management consulting services. We understand that data is becoming more and more important in helping you know what your customer needs while also increasing your profits. When you work with Four Cornerstone, we can help ensure that you get to lower your costs, identify trends, and take advantage of new opportunities by getting the top performance and extreme scalability. Call +1 (817) 377-1144 to talk to us and get the expert help you need.
Photo courtesy of go digital.
