2 New Roles of BI to Make Data Science for Everyone
We are living in the digital transformation era; volume and diversity of data will continue to grow. Click streams, sensor data, logistics data, logs from IT systems and interactions from the online purchasing generate a huge amount of data faster than ever. “Data is the new gold” only when you are able to dig deep to disclose the business values embedded in the data. If you don’t have the right tool in hand, perform analysis of big data sets will be a very sweaty job.
Traditionally, BI solutions are usually specialized computer software that can only be operated by experts. As the advancement of BI Cloud solutions, customers, partners and colleagues are all able to access BI through their mobile devices and can connect to other cloud-based business data. This totally change the decision making landscape. Decisions were usually made by senior management in the past; but because the availability of data and BI tools, middle management or even technical staff can help the companies to make timely, better and more innovative business decisions.
The roles and functions of BI in a digital world become:
- Democratize – Access to data for all
- Unlock – New data streams
- Enable – Staff becomes creative to work with data
- Connect – employees, customers and partners working on common data sets and BI
- Mobile Analytics – Insights and findings anytime and anywhere
The leading BI solution providers have made their tools accessible with a variety of devices (e.g. smartphone, tablet) and mobile operating systems (e.g. iOS, Windows Phone, Android). Although complex analysis with large data sets is not easy to be performed through mobile devices, responsive BI information visualization with powerful browsers is entirely possible.
Following are the two new roles of BI that enable data analytics for everyone:
Open Data Platforms – access to information for everyone
With advanced and easy-to-use BI tools, exploring and visualizing data will be interesting. Business leaders can create a “data culture” for their company by sharing their business analysis and visualization with their colleagues, customers, partners, or other like-minded people to add values to their business. BI can be an excellent storytelling tool to establish partnership and exchange knowledge.
Open Data programs around the world are created to ensure more and more data sources are freely available, and hopefully people can use the open data sets to create new tools, fresh insights and creative ideas.
Cloud BI – Data governance and data centre site selection
Cloud BI is used to provide organizations access to BI-related data such as dashboards, KPIs and other business analytics through Cloud services.
According to Klipfolio, the advantages of Cloud BI are:
- Ease of use– Cloud BI applications, like other cloud applications, tend to be easier for end-users to operate and set up. This means reduced IT involvement and costs.
- Deployment speed – Cloud applications are very simple to deploy, since they require no additional hardware or software installations.
- Scalability and elasticity – Cloud applications can be rapidly scaled to accommodate for an increase in the number of users in an organization.
- Accessibility – Cloud BI applications can be accessed on any web browser or on any mobile device.
Many companies that has migrated BI to the Cloud have already enjoy the benefits – lower cost, increased deployment speed and ease of use.
