Until recently, Business Intelligence & Analytics still had the reputation to be for large companies who had enough money and resources. This myth induced caution about BI & Analytics in the SME market which is unfortunate because they can benefit from that too!
Digital Disruption
With the latest and innovative developments this is no longer true. SME’s (or even small teams who have not yet gotten IT’s attention) can now use BI and even Analytics without buying expensive hard- & software and hiring expensive technical or analytical skills. Depending on the size and the vision of the enterprise, they can now choose between various formulas and deployment methods (on premise/cloud) in order to start using their data to improve business processes and start to experiment with BI & Analytics with a minimum investment of their side!
SaaS & Self-Service
With the emergence of the SaaS-model (Software-as-a-Service) and ‘Self-Service’ capabilities, even SME’s and small teams can now use BI & Analytics without a technical background. With just a few clicks you can deploy your own BI & Analytics sandbox in the cloud and start analyzing your data with an availability and support that only few IT departments can guarantee!
Ad-Hoc Explorations & Industrialized Reports
SME’s can save time by creating a single version of the truth and standardize reports with important KPI’s instead of letting different persons within the enterprise mess with some data and let them share their conclusions. Once they have these reports setup, they can find out which data is missing as well or where they have to keep an eye on the data quality in order to have dashboards that give a correct reflection of the reality and start competing with founded conclusions based on data.
Access from everywhere
Business users can play with their data in a ‘protected sandbox’ without installing a single piece of software on their laptop and view their reports everywhere on their smartphone or tablet. With latest developments on in-memory technology, analysis are performed speed-of-thought and changes on calculated items, aggregated measures, custom hierarchies, … are instantly available instead of going through a long cycle of development and deployment.
Strategy – Plan ahead
When considering the offering you’re going to go with, it’s important to think ahead and align with the strategy. In a fast changing world and a very competitive market, it’s not sufficient anymore to do BI only. A lot of BI vendors claim they do analytics but it’s important to do a decent check and find out what needs to be done and how approachable these analytics are for users without a technical/analytical background in order to start finding the true value in your data.
Key takeaway
All SME’s can benefit from the value of BI and Analytics TODAY! Watch some video’s here and go to this page to start transforming your data into value!
You also might want to read this: 5 reasons SMBs shouldn’t ignore or go it alone with analytics