Intelligence is a privilege

Ali Ahmed looks at why deploying business intelligence at scale is key to the future of data analytics and management

 

All the talk at the moment is around ChatGPT. The large language model masquerading as artificial intelligence (AI) is ripping up the rulebook on everything we have done to date – or that seems to be the popular thinking.

 

Of course, it is early days and more generative AI bots are coming. And yet, as far as we can see, the fundamentals for business intelligence (BI) remain the same: the more you can apply relevant data to the decision-making process, the more businesses can remove bias and decisions based on a whim.

 

The beauty of ChatGPT is its speed. Although there are plenty of critics questioning its depth of knowledge and indeed its accuracy, it is really its lack of individual relevance that suggests it has a long way to go.

 

Undoubtedly, AI and ML will continue to advance data analytics and management. Machine-generated data stories use AI to analyse huge volumes of data and find the insights relevant to that business. These findings are communicated back using a supporting visualisation and automatically generated narrative.

 

This will only get better. In fact, a new and exciting trend in BI is composable analytics. This means exposing your product capabilities with modern APIs, so that developers of next generation business applications can combine them with other capabilities across other deployed applications.

 

This enables an organisation to unify around its data regardless of task, making every action relevant to the overall goals and direction of the business.

 

Levelling-up

The most successful BI deployments go beyond informing the business of their performance and assist key stakeholders in decision making. Business Intelligence deployments that scale to customer-facing applications enable organisations to monetise the data.

 

An example of this is cost reduction, a key component of data monetisation, and one banking use case is interactive eStatements. As well as cost savings, digital statements offer improved customer experience and satisfaction. It’s about using the data and intelligence to not just drive organisational decisions, but innovation and deliverables that can impact the bottom line.

 

This ability to touch so many aspects of the business is key to modern business intelligence, which expands an organisation’s ability to enrich decision making through data. We are already seeing the benefits of this across a number of sectors. These include manufacturing, financial services and even motorsport, where the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One Team are using visualised, connected data to help navigate complex car design needs.

 

The fact that BI can revolutionise reporting and dashboarding in this way ensures performance data is accessible to all stakeholders – you won’t need to employ teams of data scientists to translate the results. That’s the beauty, even for analysts, as a good BI platform will enable an easy-to-use, interactive experience, self-service data preparation, visual and augmented analytics.

 

The future is already here

The ability to predict and plan using data trends is of course game-changing. But organisations still require scale, governance and reporting capabilities in BI to root any decisions firmly in the fabric of the business.

 

This is where generative AI can perhaps add another layer of intelligence, pulling together unstructured data, from notes, articles and so on, to deliver more insights and context. The real core though must be through a BI platform with automation and converged analytics, enabling immersive and smart insights for anyone – from HR and marketing leaders through to CEOs.

 

It’s important to note that to make informed decisions across an organisation, the BI platform needs to enable capabilities at scale, for predictive analytics, geolocation analytics and streaming analytics. The ability to pull through a rich layer of data in real time to visualise trends and performance analysis is becoming the key tool in modern organisations, because it is about making discoveries.

 

That’s what people enjoy about tools such as ChatGPT – the ability to discover new information on a particular subject, quickly and easily. As organisations attempt to navigate volatile economic conditions and on-going supply chain and talent acquisition pressures, this ability to discover new things becomes a truly valuable tool.

 

However, it’s also about asking the right questions. That is where analysts and leaders really earn their money – finding out things about the business that previously would have taken an eternity.

 

That is what business intelligence is all about. Whether it’s a bank analysing potential fraud, a food business discovering supply chain bottlenecks, or a retailer optimising purchasing after predicting a hot summer ahead, data has the ability to enable decision-making – if you have the tools to make it sing.

 

Business intelligence after all is not a right, it is a privilege.

 

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Ali Ahmed is General Manager at TIBCO, a business unit of Cloud Software Group

 

Main image courtesy of iStockPhoto.com