The Role of Business Intelligence (BI) In IT
Organizations maintain and analyze large volumes of data. IT departments are quickly becoming overloaded with reporting requests, training, and user support. Business intelligence (BI) initiatives are the key to reducing the ad hoc reporting workload of analysts, reducing the helpdesk support time, and increasing the data security of the organization.
In this article, we’ll cover:
- What is business intelligence?
- How BI can help IT departments
- Integrate with your existing architecture
- Security
- Data storage
- Scalability
- Business intelligence elevates IT
- Evaluating BI platforms
- IT can quickly adapt to the future of BI technology
What can Tableau do for you?
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence is a method that combines business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools, infrastructure, and best practices to provide organizations with the tools to make better, more data-driven decisions. The goal of business intelligence is to provide a complete end-to-end view of all your critical business data, all in one easy to find and understand location.
BI and information technology are closely intertwined. Both initiatives deal with information management and data. Self-service business intelligence enables IT to be more proactive and focus on governance, instead of reacting to each reporting request and support call.
How BI can help IT departments
BI platforms by design are a one-stop-shop for data. Is your team continually responding to reporting requests? Does your organization juggle multiple technology solutions for data analysis and data storage? If your answer is yes, here’s how modern BI solutions can help:
Integrate with your existing data architecture
Modern BI platforms are designed to support current IT infrastructure and data storage. If your organization has already invested in a data warehouse and data marts, the best BI solution for you will integrate with that system without middle-tier platforms.
Security
BI platforms take data security seriously. Only the users who need data will be able to access it. IT should be able to set up data permissions easily, and dashboards and reporting functions should only pull in data that the user has permissions to see.
Data Storage
BI can access multiple data sources from within a data warehouse, including databases with financial data, operational data, and CRM data seamlessly. With traditional data storage solutions, accessing data from multiple sources can be slow and difficult. The University of Notre Dame recognized their data lived in silos by department; modern BI enabled them to access the data and create reports quickly.
Scalability
Enterprise BI platforms like Tableau are designed to scale from one-person users to entire corporations. We have examples of organizations scaling up their BI initiatives to thousands of users. You should have the ability to use your BI platform with your current operating system, have mobile capabilities, and have both remote and on-premises access.
Create beautiful visualizations with your data.
Business intelligence elevates IT
Business intelligence isn’t just another IT project. It is a process and program intertwined with business operations through a platform. Once deployed, ownership belongs to business analysts or a special BI team. IT departments can focus on data governance and oversight of these platforms, and end-users can complete their own analyses. Success from BI platforms means success for all data teams, including IT.
Business intelligence in the IT industry empowers departments to focus on their own performance. Leaders can customize dashboards to track key performance indicators, such as helpdesk ticket closure rates. BI can help IT create their own plan for the future of the department by focusing on return on investment in technology solutions.
Evaluating BI platforms
While modern business intelligence platforms have similar functions, there are specific capabilities that IT departments should ensure the platform can accomplish:
- Fit within your current data architecture
- Enable business users to find answers autonomously
- Training and support for users of any skill level
Tableau offers training on our BI products so that decision-makers can access the reports they need without contacting IT. See our evaluation guide for modern BI tools.
IT can quickly adapt to the future of BI technology
Like all programs and processes in the IT industry, enterprise business intelligence is evolving fast. Transform your culture into a data culture using business intelligence. Elevate your team and empower the business to seek and find their own answers in data. See our Blueprint for your organization’s BI strategy so you can get started.