While many organizations are looking for new ways to gather relevant company data, they need to make sure they have a productive way to analyze it. Failure to do this causes companies to not be as effective as they could be.
Recently, SAS Institute and BMI-TechKnowledge, released the results of a poll of 350 companies. The main takeaway is that smaller businesses need to improve their complex business models and analytics.
North-West University professor Machiel Kruger told the news source that with the increase in information flow, the inability of local organizations to make use of analytics will have an adverse impact on productivity, competitiveness and ultimately economic development and job creation.
He added that business intelligence deals with data cleaning to prepare reporting tools for managers, and business analytics uses data inputted into models to make meaningful predictive decisions.
"A proper analytics strategy drills down to various pockets of the organization by identifying problems that need attending to, either through cost minimization or increasing turnover by taking out suboptimal processes to drive profitability in the organization," Edcon business intelligence manager Brent Henegan told the news source.
The poll also found that 87 percent of companies are still using spreadsheets as their main analytical tools. This is leading to a lack of information sharing which hampers departments as they are not able to integrate and share full data.
With the help of a custom database software solution, any organization can find a better way to gather and analyze its data to make the decision making process easier.