What a BI Developer Means to Business

The value of any data lies in its ability to transform business decisions. Companies today generate massive streams of information, from annual sales to market trends. But all these bits of data are useless if they just collect dust in the archives. For the company to benefit, the data must be processed appropriately, structured, and visualized. This is the primary goal of Business Intelligence developers: to help you gain a competitive advantage by using analytics effectively – whether it concerns startup development, entering new markets, or increasing sales.

Let's turn to research. According to Stratistics MRC, the global Business Intelligence market is expected to grow up to 29.48 billion USD by 2022, with a CAGR of 11.1%. This means the demand for BI developer services will grow alongside it.

At the same time, Nucleus Research states that for every dollar spent on business intelligence, performance management, and predictive analytics, companies earn an average of 10.66 USD. These earnings suggest that BI tools allow businesses to increase their profits significantly using only the data they already have in assets.

Keep reading to learn what BI in business stands for and why you should consider hiring a business intelligence developer.

The Main Components of Business Intelligence

The term Business Intelligence (BI) encompasses software, systems, processes, infrastructure, strategies, techniques, and other tools to obtain business information about the company and its environment. Once the data is collected, it is used to make strategic decisions.

To understand BI software and what features it should have, consider these major components of business intelligence:

• OLAP (online analytical processing). This technology is responsible for data discovery, sophisticated calculations, trend analysis, and "what-if" simulations. The analysis is conducted in a multidimensional manner so the end-user can view business information from different angles when making a decision.
• Corporate performance management. CPM is an essential component of business intelligence for companies whose purpose is to reduce costs, improve financial planning processes, launch products on new markets, improve internal operational procedures, and more. This set of tools aims to process targeted information for further planning, forecasting, analytics, and improvement.
• Real-time BI. This component is used to analyze data at the data collection stage. It allows you to quickly retrieve information about the company's business processes and respond to trends, which is critical in today's rapidly changing environment and mobile society.
• Data warehouse. It allows you to store large amounts of data in various ways so the user can view specific information, like product sales on Fridays over the past 30 years, and study the relationship between different components effectively.
• Data sources. They include various forms of stored information, as well. Possible sources cover CRM, e-commerce applications, enterprise resource planning, web services, enterprise databases, etc.

Business intelligence tools can include numerous, highly specialized functions required for a particular industry. Therefore, reaching the company’s goals with a BI engineer is the shortest path to success. Based on their experience and market understanding, developers will implement the right models and solutions for working with data.

Specialists can help with:

• Setting the correct business requirements for BI tools
• Forming technical specifications for BI software
• Developing BI and further maintaining the software
• Working with reporting and data modeling
• Participating in data warehouse design
• Сreating technical information for BI software

With a specialized developer in place, you can get the most out of your business intelligence integration.

Why Do You Need Business Intelligence?

Until recently, business intelligence implementation was expensive and only attractive to large corporations. Today, with technology advancements, simple SaaS tools, and cloud computing progress, BI's benefits are available to any company, regardless of size.

You can integrate business intelligence in various areas: sales, insurance, education, healthcare, information technology, aviation, and others. For example, a retail store, guided by their statistics, may buy a particular brand of champagne for Christmas and New Year holidays since their customers have been choosing it over others for five years straight.

Also, using business intelligence tools effectively will allow your business to get a deep insight into industry trends and simplify your strategic decision-making model. No matter what stage your startup is in, you will have a working tool to strengthen your market position by applying accurate data.

Now, let's look at the benefits BI developers bring to businesses. They can help with:

• Determining ways to increase profits
• Analyzing customer behavior and competitive environments
• Identifying trends quickly and obtaining data to react properly
• Improving business efficiency
• Forecasting results
• Identifying and fixing problems before they affect performance

Today, one of the key benefits offered by business intelligence tools is the data, wrapped adequately by a BI developer, that can be used by non-technical team members to improve business processes.

How Can You Build and Use a Business Intelligence Solution?

BI is becoming an increasingly important part of modern business. Its tools help companies understand the past and present better, predict the future, and act reasonably. Implementing BI increases the likeliness of gaining and maintaining a competitive advantage. Therefore, choosing the right development partner is crucial.

A trusted technical partner knows how to build a business intelligence solution that meets the company's needs in its specific industry. The creation process includes:

• Determining the company's individual business needs and converting them into technical requirements.
• Building the ecosystem for working with data, using both on-premises and cloud-based BI solutions.
• Business intelligence development for receiving, storing, and transforming the data.
• Optimizing created solutions for high performance and perfect uptime.
• Multi-stage compliance testing.
• Supporting the developed solution and assisting client's team members with the use of BI.
• Data visualization via reporting systems.

Interested? Contact us to learn how BI solutions can help you grow your business more efficiently.