How Business Intelligence Can Help Small and Medium Businesses Stay Competitive

Business intelligence (BI) is an increasingly essential tool for organizations looking to gain a competitive edge, especially for small and medium size businesses (SMBs). The trend is clear: SMBs that use data analytics tools are twice as likely to report revenue growth compared to those that do not. It’s no wonder that the BI market is expected to grow to more than $40 billion USD by 2025, as more and more businesses turn to data-driven decision-making to boost productivity and streamline their operations.

BI tools can help today’s business leaders assess market trends, forecast sales, and improve the customer experience. Advanced dashboards and data visualizations can provide key insights and allow businesses to make informed decisions in real time.

SMBs have been relatively slow to embrace BI tools compared to larger corporations. But this doesn’t need to be the case. Today, cloud-based solutions make it easier than ever for SMBs to tap into the benefits that BI tools provide.

Why should SMBs invest in business intelligence tools?

The amount of data that businesses generate every day is growing at an exponential rate. If you are one of the thousands of SMBs still operating out of spreadsheets or manually processing printed forms, BI tools can make your daily operations less tedious. To make sense of it all, BI software—together with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)—enable businesses to quickly process large amounts of information, identifying patterns and trends that would be challenging for humans to detect on their own.

What does this look like in practice for an SMB?

RetentionX is an SMB that specializes in helping direct-to-consumer brands expand their customer base and improve customer retention. Their automation software allows customers to turn consumer data into valuable insights that inform marketing strategies.

Amazon Web Services helped RetentionX scale its technology solutions to ensure that its site would be reliable at all times. With AWS Cloud, they didn’t need to worry about maintaining physical servers or databases and could instead focus on their product. Because of ML tools such as AWS SageMaker and Amazon Forecast, RetentionX can understand shopper behavioral insights, which paints the picture of what business will look like in the future. Together, this helps improve uptime and customer insights.

What does the future hold for BI tools?

Going forward, BI tools will continue to integrate data from a variety of sources, including Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as sensors, social media conversations, and public datasets. This will allow businesses to gain a more complete, accurate understanding of their operations and customers to make more informed decisions.

At the same time, the increasing adoption of edge computing, which allows data to be processed and analyzed closer to the source of data collection, will enable businesses to analyze data in real time—reducing latency and improving the accuracy of their insights. Edge computing also helps reduce the amount of data transmitted over networks, lowering costs and decreasing the security risks associated with data transmission. For instance, some manufacturers currently use sensors on their machinery to collect usage data.

But this is just the beginning. There are three key areas in which BI tools are expected to evolve as well.

Natural language processing

As BI tools develop, businesses will be able to interact with their data and analytics in a more human-like way. Rather than having to navigate through complicated data visualizations, natural language processing (NLP) will allow users to ask questions and receive answers in natural language. For time-constrained teams it’s much easier to ask, “which traffic sources contribute to the most sales” instead of manually downloading data files and reviewing.

Take one of AWS customer, BlueDot, as an example.

Using ML and NLP technologies, BlueDot’s SaaS platform is able to assess the risk of disease outbreaks. It does this by gathering information on more than 150 different diseases and syndromes in 65 different languages. The platform scans official notifications, health forums, and online media every 15 minutes, 24 hours a day, and cross-references that information with commercial air-traffic itineraries and other datasets to predict outbreaks. This enables faster, more proactive action, ultimately mitigating the risk where possible.

New to digitization or looking to add more cloud capabilities to your SMB? Explore solutions by industry, benefit, use case, and more on AWS Smart Business

Augmented reality and virtual reality

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) allow users to interact with information in a more immersive and intuitive way. For example, a manager in a manufacturing facility could use AR to overlay data and analytics onto a live view of the factory floor, allowing them to quickly identify bottlenecks and optimize operations.

Similarly, a marketer could use VR to visualize purchase data in a 3D environment, helping to identify patterns and trends that might not be immediately obvious in traditional data visualizations.

Already, this technology is driving advances in business intelligence. VR firm and AWS customer, Varjo, is helping customers create new consumer electronic products. Varjo partnered with Boeing to create astronaut training simulations, and Volvo car designers use VR technology to virtually evaluate prototypes, safety features, and designs.

Data governance

Of course, as more and more SMBs adopt BI tools, it is more vital than ever that information is handled securely and appropriately. Companies must implement robust data governance policies and procedures and ensure that employees are trained in data ethics and privacy best practices. This will help to ensure that the data is accurate, reliable, and used in a way that respects the rights of individuals. Read how you can implement a data governance strategy for your SMB.

What’s the best way to turn data into valuable business insights?

The future of business intelligence is set to be more accessible, more intuitive, and more powerful than ever before. As a result, SMBs will be able to gain a deeper understanding of their operations and customers, proactively react to market changes, stay ahead of the competition, and ultimately make more informed decisions that drive business success.

But while most SMBs recognize the benefits of connecting data and using analytics to make better decisions, they face barriers to getting the insights they need.

Cloud-based solutions offer the infrastructure, capabilities, and support that businesses need to take full advantage of today’s BI tools. The cloud is the fastest way to get visibility into and integration of all of your data. Cloud services offer a way to connect, analyze, and display data from many different sources in a single user-friendly dashboard. A cloud-based approach to analytics also provides SMBs with a path to continuously improve upon the way data is used, leveraging the latest technological advances.

And with AWS, businesses can easily scale storage and compute capacity in line with their needs, without the burden of managing the physical infrastructure. We also have highly trained experts who can provide guidance and share best practices on how to get the most out of today’s BI tools. If you’re looking to modernize your data analytics strategy or looking to optimize your current one, AWS has solutions for your business.

Next steps

Take advantage of the cloud to uncover new insights from your various data sources. With AWS, your team can analyze information in user-friendly dashboards and uncover hidden trends, recognize cost drivers, and improve forecasts. Take a closer look at how we can help you streamline operations and boost your business.