Types of business intelligent users in your organization

Business Intelligence simply refers to using data to make informed decisions. For businesses to apply Business Intelligence or BI, it requires an assortment of strategies, tools, architecture and rules to modify the raw data into useful insights that help in driving productivity in the business processes. In this blog, we will talk about how many types of BI users are there and how they use BI.

Earlier, BI was managed by the data analysts and IT team. With technology evolving to find viable solutions, we now have visualization and analytics technology in the form of BI that is available for everyone to use and benefit from. BI has made using past data to retrieve information, explore data and discover new insights that can change the business strategy altogether. 

Now the question arises which departments are the most benefited from BI.

Well, BI benefits the entire business but is being used by certain departments. Let’s look at how many types of BI users are there. 

Data Analyst

Without a doubt, business analysts love data and deciphering hidden valuable information. A data analyst uses BI to continuously collect and analyze data, organize it and make it presentable. Data analysts use BI to retrieve information from the statistics, and data patterns to gain insights and think of the best ways to present that data. Getting fresh insights to help business to change/ improve their business strategy. 

Executives 

When we talk about informed decision-making, we are obviously talking about ‘you’ – the decision maker and the executive level like the CEO. Whenever there is a business decision involved, everyone always looks up to the decision-makers. 

BI helps you get an organizational overview and spot trends and discrepancies. It supports you to improve the entire structure of the business. It helps in building efficient systems, reducing costs, bring in innovation and operational efficiency. 

BI provides you with KPIs and detailed periodic reports to make your decision-making process easy. 

Business User

When we talk about how many types of BI users are there,  business users cannot be missed. It is generally implied that we are talking about people who are ‘users’ of the company. But this is not true. We are talking about people who use business data and BI tools for the business. 

Business users are classified into casual or regular users and power users or advanced users. Now, the difference between the two users is that a casual user will use the dashboards and predefined data sets while the advanced user will work with the complex data sets. Generally, a regular business user is a manager who looks for ways to improve departmental efficiency. An advanced BI user is capable of collecting, organizing, analyzing, and presenting data. This user knows exactly what he/she wants and uses BI tools along with his/her skills to fulfill the requirements. 

IT department

We already mentioned that the IT department was one to manage data to get useful insights along with Data Analysts. Well, it is still one important users of BI and is not just using BI but is also responsible for the maintenance of the infrastructure and tools that is used by the company for BI. They enable the adoption of BI tools in business operations by filling in the existing gaps between departments and their functions.

It is in fact, the responsibility of the IT department to ensure that the different business users get the data they are looking for and play an important role in data governance and security. 

When you adopt BI, you must keep these users in mind, in particular, to ensure that you reap the highest benefit from BI. It should be able to provide in-depth analysis and be user-friendly at the same time for all the stakeholders to benefit from it. Another important point to keep in mind is that your BI solution should be industry focused. Besides the conventional norms of how many types of BI users are there, focus more on identifying the gaps, using the data and seeing where BI is not producing the desired results itself and the analytical capabilities of the BI users or the training received by them. 

Hope this blog helps you in making the right decision about BI and what to keep in mind when implementing it. If you need any assistance in BI, you can always reach out to us!