BI Reporting: A Meaningful Overview

Business intelligence reporting (BI reporting) plays a critical role in any analytics strategy by providing the data and insights that organizations need to make better decisions. It is used to identify areas of improvement, track trends over time, and make predictions about future performance. But what exactly is business intelligence reporting? In this article, we’ll take a closer look at its definition and explore its key features. By understanding it better, you’ll be able to more effectively utilize this powerful, differentiating capability in your organization.

What Are Other Kinds of BI?

The meaning of ‘reporting’ as a category in BI has evolved over time. A decade or more ago, it used to mean pixel-perfect reports of the kind used by finance departments to do financial analytics, such as highly structured P&L reports as one example. At that time there were various other categories within BI including dashboarding with key performance indicators (KPIs), ad hoc analysis, geo-spatial BI (GBI), and even predictive analytics as a handful of examples.

However, in the last number of years when people speak about ‘business intelligence reporting’, many times (even most times now) they are actually referring to the analytical output of BI overall- as a kind of synonym for BI or analytics, which can make it somewhat confusing for anyone who has been in the industry a long time.

The Benefits of Business Intelligence Reporting

Business intelligence reporting provides a comprehensive view of your company’s performance and helps you identify areas for improvement or further growth opportunities. It can also be used to track changes over time so you can determine which strategies are working and which aren’t. Additionally, it can help you make more accurate predictions about future performance based on current conditions and past trends. This type of reporting allows you to stay ahead of any changes in the market or industry so you can adjust your plans accordingly.

How to Help Your Company Make Better Decisions

BI / analytics is a critical way for companies to make informed, data-driven decisions. By providing a comprehensive picture of the current state of the business and delivering insights into potential trends, businesses can use self-service BI reporting to identify areas of potential growth and improvement opportunities.

With its flexible approach, it is easy to customize the analytics content to fit the unique needs of any company. From analyzing customer patterns and productivity metrics to tracking sales pipelines, it provides a differentiating set of capabilities for organizations that want to maximize their efficiency and make proactive decisions.

How to Begin at Your Organization

Learning the fundamentals of business intelligence reporting is an important step for companies looking to capitalize on their data. Getting started involves gathering the necessary data from both external and internal sources, understanding what metrics to focus on, and determining how best to visualize them for decision-making. Many powerful tools can help you with this process, however, implementing and gaining an understanding of the underlying framework and technology can take some time.

It’s important to know when to enlist the help of experts in order to ensure a smooth and successful introduction of BI reporting into your company. With careful planning, it’s not hard at all to get started on a journey toward smarter, data-driven decisions.

What are the Best BI Reporting Platforms?

In our decades of experience, the two best Bi reporting systems in the market that stand so far above the rest that we recommend really only using one of these two QlikSense (not QlikTech) and Domo. Both are available in the cloud, but Domo is the only truly cloud-native solution, and it does show when it comes to administrative overhead.

There are so many reasons, why you should avoid the big, old BI options like IBM Cognos, Oracle BI, SAP Business Objects, Microsoft PowerBI and so on, but it is beyond the scope of this article (and kind of self-evident for anyone who has used those). And while solutions such as Tableau, Looker and SiSense are also good, they cannot compare to by far the best bi reporting tools Domo and QlikSense when it comes to things like sheer performance, scalability and user adoption. Read more on this topic in these articles:

• Domo Platform– Value in Adoption (Top 5 Capabilities)
• The Power of Domo Analytics Explained
• BI Reporting – 3 Ways Domo Has Transformed it for Good

Conclusion

Business intelligence reporting is a fundamental building block for all organizations now to gain insight into the organization’s performance and to make informed decisions that will help drive better business outcomes. With its potential to give you a comprehensive view of your company’s performance combined with its ability to track changes over time and provide more accurate predictions about future performance, this kind of capability can be an invaluable resource for improving and differentiating your organization.

Graphable’s analytics / Domo consulting services are tailored to fit your organization’s specific needs. We will start by looking at your data and learning about your business goals before designing a solution that best fits with those objectives. Our team of experienced professionals will work with you every step of the way, from understanding what data is available to analyzing it and creating truly impactful analytics. Read here to understand in detail how to find a best-fit business intelligence consultant partner.

For related analytics and Domo-specific topics, check out these articles:

• Domo demo video
• What makes a great business intelligence consultant?
• Best BI solutions?
• What is Domo analytics?
• The Domo Platform
• Domo dashboards
• Dashboarding – what it is is and how to begin
• What are digital dashboards?
• Domo maps,
• Domo analyzer (KPI builder and ad hoc UI)
• Domo Workbench
• Domo custom connector – how to
• Build a Domo JSON connector
• Domo variables
• Domo everywhere
• Create a Domo app

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