How to Make Data-Driven Decisions with Business Analytics

Data is only as valuable as the insights it can produce, and it is crucial to understand which data to use and how to make the most of it.

The success of data-driven decisions will be determined by the metrics chosen and should be focused on areas of the business where growth is essential.

The data used should be representative of the overall business.

Developing a data-driven culture

A data-driven culture is based on facts and numbers, not gut feelings. It replaces opinion with facts and data, both financial essentials and advanced findings.

Data-driven decisions empower all employees to make better decisions and improve customer conversations. Data-driven culture starts at the top with a strong leader.

Leaders in companies with strong data-driven cultures typically lead by example and set expectations for the company. In fact, their board reports often refer to data-driven decisions throughout the organization.

Building a data-driven culture requires a commitment to data-driven decision-making. It requires a significant investment and a fundamental shift in mindset. Anyone can begin the journey to becoming a data-driven culture.

Keep in mind, however, that different organizations require different analyses and strategies. In the meantime, here are some tips to help you get started on your journey.

Identifying key trends and patterns

Business intelligence (BI) is the process of analyzing data and drawing conclusions. It helps enterprises to identify issues, track performance, detect trends, and spot opportunities.

By analyzing data and making data-driven decisions, businesses can boost sales, develop new products and services, and forecast success.

Identifying key trends and patterns is an important part of BI, and it begins with data preparation and querying. BI involves collecting data from multiple sources, cleaning, validating, and transforming it.

BI is a powerful tool that combines data analytics, reporting, and visualization. The key is to find the right BI tool for your business.

The best tools can pull data from a wide variety of sources and present it in an easy-to-read format. They should be easy to use and filter down to key metrics. Ultimately, business intelligence can help your company increase profitability and revenue, and reduce risk.

Managing data sources

Managing data sources for data-driven decisions is critical for successful business analytics.

In order to achieve meaningful data-driven decisions, your organization must have a single source of truth for its data. This single source of truth can reduce the time and effort spent on finding and analyzing data. Data must be reliable and representative to produce actionable insight.

If you are using multiple data sources to make decisions, you should carefully consider the level of analysis required.

The first step in ensuring that your company's data is clean and relevant is data preparation. While preparing data for analysis, you need to prioritize the most important data with the highest impact. Focus on those data sources that have the highest impact for the audience and can be used for the development of high-impact dashboards.

With traditional BI this is a cumbersome and time intensive process that requires hundreds or thousands of hours invested in analysis and integration, but with GoSimplo all the supported data sources have already been submitted to such a rigorous process to provide you with plug and play integrations to your data sources. 

Benefits of BI tools

Business intelligence (BI) tools are a vital part of making informed decisions. Unlike spreadsheets, these tools use raw data to create analytical reports. They can be used for marketing, sourcing, purchasing, inventory understanding, and HR analytics.

These tools help companies automate processes that previously took weeks or even months to complete. By making it easier to analyze data, BI tools can make decision-making quicker and easier for users of all levels.

For example, Google is constantly refining their algorithms and working to understand people better and the information they are seeking. This helps them to serve their users better.

With business intelligence tools, companies can make better decisions that align with their long-term goals. Businesses can benefit from this by having the data at their fingertips. They can also make the information more accessible and useful.

A good example of this is Google analytics. It provides detailed information on customer preferences and patterns, and helps companies make better decisions.

Data Driven Decisions for SMEs 

For small and medium sized companies the investment needed in order to support proper data-driven decisions with the traditional BI approach are prohibitive.

This is why we developed simple solutions that include integrations to source systems, BI dashboards and advanced machine learning based forecasting models. This way we bring the benefits of data-driven decisions to a segment that has traditionally been left in the dark by the price tag of BI.

Try GoSimplo today and go from the dark to the light of data driven decision making in just five minutes by connecting your data sources and visualizing your data it in predefined dashboards. 

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