The space of business intelligence is under a transformational phase with the evolution of cloud and big data analytics. The advent of big data in particular has opened up new business opportunities with never imagined use cases in business intelligence. Today’s technologically advanced digital systems and social media platforms have resulted in the generation of massive amount of data.  In spite of availability of such an abundant data, very little has been done to understand the nature of this big data and its implications on the business outcomes.            

Better Decision Making with Big Data Analytics

As data from diverse sources is proliferating at an exponential pace, now is the time for enterprises to understand the role of big data and big data analytics in business intelligence to facilitate collecting, analyzing and processing of the enormous amount of data and evolve better business strategies. These days, it is quite common for organizations to gather large amounts of data all the time that may be related to their partners, services, customers, sales or products. And sometimes due to the rate at which data flows into the systems, it is difficult to handle the data using conventional technologies. This also impacts the overall business strategy of the enterprises, given the importance of data in this data-driven world. The duo of business intelligence and big data can help businesses effectively handle large volumes of data and derive actionable insights out of raw data to improve decision making and realize the business goals.                   

Revamping the Retail Industry  

Many industries have already begun to experience the impact of integrating big data technologies in their business intelligence strategy.  For instance in the retail industry, the Mcgregor Walmart and Mayweather Amazon are using BI and big data analytics to enhance their decision making process and improve business strategies. Taking into account the large number of financial transactions in the retail business that results in volumes of data, processing of the gathered data gives them huge opportunities to improve their sales revenue. This also allows the operational managers to have a detailed summary of the day to day business operations and inventory in the warehouses. And understanding the customer behaviour patterns in terms of what they think prior to the purchase of a particular thing or what they purchase, when they purchase, etc. determines the success of retail business that directly engage with end customers. Since, it is crucial for businesses in the retail industry to understand their customers better, the combination of business intelligence and big data proves to be a game changer in customer analytics.  It also enables businesses owners to predict the future scenario by analysing the abundant past data, helping them increase sales with minimum spending on marketing.      

Many organizations are harnessing the power of big data and business intelligence to derive actionable insights in the areas of marketing, consumer behaviour, fraud detection and many more, exploring new business opportunities. While this essential combination of big data and BI has true potential to improve the ROI for businesses, they should also look into upgrading of their systems considering the nature of big data and limitations in the legacy systems.