Let me start with a quote which appeared in the end, “Great BI is about understanding what you and your colleagues are going to do differently tomorrow because of the insight you have today”, this probably summed up the entire article.

For those who are still there, here are the 5 tips, pretty condensed, you can read the entire article by clicking here.

Tip 1.
BI needs to be seen as an organization-wide cultural approach.
How much ever you might invest in BI technology year-on-year, you need to build an organizational culture which can consume it and develop actionable insight, if not, he suggests, don’t start it. See Tip 5. for reinforcement.

Tip 2.
Ensure the “big guy” in your organization is standing behind your BI initiative.
A simple reason for this being, it can be costly and may take some time to get the BI initiative right. The single most important output of a BI initiative is the single version of truth on which the company can take decisions, you wouldn’t want a skeptic doubting the output which chips away the credibility of the entire initiative.

Tip 3.
Get outside help to win early.
While your own team may require some time to deliver big wins, an external BI expert can help you win early, this is critical to ensure the organization stays the course in the long term.

Tip 4.
Keep checking back with business on what you are building.
BI means different things for different stakeholders, while some think it is key to making quality decisions faster, some might want a neat reporting, for some, it might be just process automation. Hence, keep checking back with business, not doing so would leave a lot of the stakeholders unhappy.

Tip 5.
This is probably the best and the most relevant.
Ensure your people know what to do with the insights.
Investing a whole lot of time, effort and money, building some real good dashboards come to a naught if the team is unable to take the insights generated and take some action based on that. It is like building a great space program without knowing where it is going and what’s supposed to do.

Writing how decision based on data is more effective than those based on intuition, perception and assumptions, he goes along to tell that businesses driven by data are five times more likely to make faster decisions than their peers. And they are twice more likely to land up in the top quartile of financial management within their industry.

Till very recently only large enterprises with access to sophisticated business intelligence tools and ability to collect vast amount of data were beneficiaries of this data driven strategy, business also had to invest in analytical solutions and data scientist to convert this data into useful information leaving out large chunk of small and medium business out of its sphere of influence, but this is going to change in 2017.

In their bid to be on par with large enterprises on taking advantage of data driven technologies, SMBs are turning to self – sufficient business intelligence tools. With intuitive interfaces, astute data preparation tools and this coming at very low price points allow SMBs to be their own data scientists.

In light of this development, Ralph Tkatchuk expects business intelligence to change in 2017 due to the following,

• Affordable Access – Complex data analytics becoming more cost effective and hence accessible to SMBs.
• Smart Integration – BI is becoming available thru’ more integrations like messaging services and IOT, and BI is moving to on – demand service and helping SMBs.
• Simplified Analytics – With comprehensive solution for back end number crunching and front virtualization, BI is commoditized to be within the reach of SMBs.
• Cloud based data – The adoption of cloud based data- warehousing is contributing to SMBs BI self-sufficiency.
• Evolved Visualization – The new self – sufficient BI tools offer data visualization in interactive and real time mode spurning dashboards which one can drill down.
• Collaboration – With BI becoming accessible, SMBs may employ cross – team collaboration to increase effectiveness and efficiency.

All these above advances are making SMBs adapt to BI extensively in the coming days.

To read more on this subject, visit: http://dataconomy.com/2017/02/6-ways-business-intelligence-changes

Tibco Spotfire has a user base in verticals like Energy, Financial Services, Manufacturing, Telecom and Consumer Goods and Retail.

Tibco Spotfire is available in 3 versions; Desktop, aimed at individuals, Cloud which is offered as SaaS model and Spotfire Platform which covers for the whole organization.

The latest version in the market is Spotfire 7 which stresses on Faster and Easier data exploration. So what’s new in Spotfire 7?

The Recommendations wizard helps the user get into data analytics quickly and easily. In-built expertise ensures the user makes great visualization choices. Setting-up the whole system is so simple even a newbie to data analytics can get it up and running in a few seconds.

Lot more design options, more modern and eye catching that help user create beautiful dashboards and data visualization. User can create custom workspaces which reflects his/her own style.

With streamlined UI elements in place, data discovery is much more faster while still offering ease-of-use.

To learn more, visit Tibco Spotfire 7, here.

If BI tools can be used to answer the “Why” question it would very well help companies gain an understanding of why customers buy what they buy, why employees produce more/less sitting under the same environment, why stock markets fall/rise, why equipments breakdown, why the situation developed and became a crisis…

The study of “why” in any scenario is the realm of “contextual analysis”. Contextual analysis “is a method to analyze the environment in which a business operates… context analysis considers the entire environment of a business, its internal and external environment. This is an important aspect of business planning. One kind of context analysis, called SWOT analysis, allows the business to gain an insight into their strengths and weaknesses and also the opportunities and threats posed by the market within which they operate. The main goal of a context analysis, SWOT or otherwise, is to analyze the environment in order to develop a strategic plan of action for the business.” This is according to Wikipedia. The word “business” can be replaced with “environment”, “situation”, “behaviour”… to apply this definition for any area.

Now let us look at three specific examples of how inputs from contextual analysis is used in business.

Retail – to understand why customers choose products from a specific rack/aisle, why they abandon shopping carts, why increased engagement levels don’t mean increase in conversion rates, why some customers prefer coupons overs discounts… contextual analysis can explain the trend that is prevailing might be a temporary or a permannent one.

Stock market – most players in the stock market do make certain amount of prediction while making their investments on a company/scrip. This prediction is based on the understanding on why a certain board would make such a decision, to answer the question “why”, publicly available data on the board members, their voting patterns, financial data points are used in addition to external environment and public sentiment.

Energy and natural gas – Contextual analysis answers questions like why certain weather patterns lead to fall in productivity, why a piece of equipment is damaged at a certain level of operation…answering these questions can ensure workarounds or prevention to increase productivity.

To get more info on contextual analysis, suggest this article in Informationweek.