Every day, companies across the globe produce huge volumes of data. Much of this data is more valuable than some entrepreneurs realize. Leveraged correctly, it can provide insights into everything from your target audience and their purchasing journey to which internal processes are stopping your company from earning additional profits. The trouble is, manually accessing, analyzing, and understanding huge amounts of data is practically impossible.

That’s why Business Intelligence tools have emerged as such a crucial resource for today’s company. The right technology can provide behind-the-scenes insights into your most crucial metrics and KPIs, helping you to make rapid decisions for business growth.

Here’s everything you need to know about BI software, and how you can choose the right tool for your company’s unique needs.

What is Business Intelligence Software?

Let’s start with the basics. Business Intelligence, or BI software, is a solution companies can use to ingest, organize, and manage data. With the right BI tool, you can consolidate information from a range of different environments, such as your CRM software, communication tools, and databases, and transform raw information into charts, graphs, reports, and dashboards. BI tools help business users to access and understand both historical and real-time data and then to use data to boost performance and efficiency.

What’s more, effective tools can help you to get more value out of the data you collect. You can use the insights you gather to improve business decisions, identify issues with workflows, spot market trends, and more. BI tools vary in scope and functionality. Some include analytical processing engines which allow organizations to ask questions of data streams, such as which sales strategy delivers the most ROI? Some tools also come with built-in solutions for automation and artificial intelligence, which can help teams to derive more meaningful insights from raw data.

How Do You Choose a BI Software Solution?

As demand for BI tools continues to grow, the biggest challenge for most companies is in figuring out which software they should be investing in. There’s no one-size-fits-all strategy for choosing the right BI tool. Although it might be tempting to opt for popular choices, like Microsoft Power BI, the popularity of a tool doesn’t always correlate with its value for your company. You’ll need to consider your company and team size, the type of data you need to analyze, your visualization requirements, and even your integration needs to find the solution best suited for your situation.

Articles comparing business intelligence software can help you to make more informed decisions based on your specific needs. It’s also worth carefully auditing your current data landscape and asking questions about the features that are most valuable to your company, the budget you’re willing to allocate to BI solutions, and the technical knowledge of your team members, so you know where to start searching.

Don’t just dive into choosing the first tool you see with positive reviews. Take the time to assess your company, and set goals for your BI software, so you can select the software capable of driving the best return on your investment.

Why is BI Software Important?

Business Intelligence tools have grown increasingly crucial in today’s competitive space, as they’re essential to helping organizations differentiate themselves from competitors in the market. With BI tools, organizations can ask questions of their data, and get answers in plain language. Instead of just guessing at which strategies are working and which aren’t, companies can utilize their data to make decisions based on genuine facts and insights.

With the right BI tools, organizations can improve return on investment by understanding the needs of customers, and intelligently allocating resources to the best strategic objectives. BI tools help companies monitor business operations, pinpoint problems, and make improvements to their strategy on a consistent basis. The right tools can even unravel customer preferences and trends, improve supply chain management, or help with production strategies.