One of the industries that experts are predicting cloud transformation in is business intelligence. The fact is that the tools that analysts use are becoming obsolete. Modern business intelligence tools are 10-15 years old, and instead of moving to the cloud, the industry continues to stagnate. The unwillingness or inability to transform entails a slowdown in market growth. And if you put it into numbers, you can mathematically prove a simple truth: cloud-based business intelligence helps companies boost growth.

The business intelligence market itself is much more interesting than it may seem because it has the potential for powerful and rapid growth. But to do very well, the market needs to adapt to the cloud reality. To stay afloat, businesses need to collect and analyze large amounts of data and properly use data analysis in business processes. For this to happen really fast, the business intelligence tools and platform needs to be ready for the cloud economy. 

And even though the cloud can create tangible value and therefore help grow the business, not many people understand the difference between cloud readiness and cloud adoption. When the cloud is implemented, you can easily extract analytical and factual value from tons of disparate data like files in Dropbox, tweets, RSS feeds, documents, comments on Facebook. You will be able to get huge amounts of data and implement this useful information for your enterprise. This is just one example out of dozens.

The dominant approach, however, is a different one. Business analysts prefer to say that they are ready to move to the cloud, but we are not seeing widespread adoption of the cloud because of this “readiness”. Primarily because this approach means not an introduction, but a banal transfer of existing, outdated systems to cloud hosting. Thus, without changing virtually anything, the analytics department can pretend that all of the company’s analytics are already in the cloud. But in fact, no additional value is being produced.

What exactly is the purpose of cloud technology in business intelligence?

Mainly, to strengthen all business departments with the results of analytical activities. Unfortunately, not all employees of companies that have implemented business analytics use the data acquired through analytics in their operations.

What if, with the help of clouds, we could increase the number of employees who will use business analytics? To do that, we need to understand how business analytics is structured in most companies. Typically, the financial planning and analytics department gets the data first. The department is directly dependent on the IT department, which supplies the data. The information is processed by the analysts and used within the same financial planning department, in most cases without going outside of it.

And it turns out that company employees working directly with the client do not get the results of analytics — and therefore cannot draw the right conclusions about how exactly they need to adjust their activities. Therefore, by using business intelligence in the cloud, it is possible to increase the number of employees who will use all the available information.

Conclusion

Many analysts are convinced that the introduction of a cloud business intelligence platform will make more openness to processing data analytics results. First and foremost, employees at the perimeter of the company, those who work with customers. If, say, a call center can receive data on customer reactions to the next sales script in real time, it could bring the company a tangible profit through constant correction of speech modules. 

And to beat the competition and give the best to the client you need to use the latest technology, but not everyone can afford it, so we advise contacting companies that provide business intelligence services. But you also need to pay attention to business security in the cloud. You can read more about it in our article.