BI Solutions for Cost-Effective Analytics: 5 Sound Strategies

By Carter Sheppard / Consultant

May 22, 2023

Blog

Reading Time: 5 minutes

BI Solutions (a.k.a. business intelligence) have become clearly integral to driving business success. However, there has been a growing need for organizations to optimize their BI solutions to make them more cost-effective. Cost-effective BI solutions combine the power of data analytics with opportunities to automate those analytics workflows, making them an attractive proposition for businesses looking to maximize returns on their investments.

Cost-effective BI solutions also include leveraging cloud computing, simplifying data analysis, improving data accuracy, and implementing data governance – each of which can help businesses save money and improve their bottom line. By the end of this blog, you’ll have a better understanding of how to optimize your BI solutions to improve your analytics capabilities while keeping costs in check.

Understanding the Value of BI Solutions for Cost-Effective Analytics

At their core, BI solutions are about using data to inform decision-making and drive business success. They can help organizations streamline their analytics and reporting capabilities, providing valuable insights into everything from sales and marketing to financal analytics and operations. However, given the complexity of many of the solutions, cost-effectiveness can quickly become a concern.

Fortunately, there are a number of strategies and tools that businesses can use to maximize the value of their BI solutions while keeping costs in check.

BI solutions
1. Streamlining Your Data Collection Process

One of the key challenges that businesses face when using BI solutions is gathering and managing data. Automating data collection can help reduce man-hours spent within the data collection process, making it more efficient, more reliable, and more cost-effective.

Additionally, automating data collection frees up valuable business resources and personnel to focus on analyzing data and using it to inform decision-making, rather than spending valuable time and resources collecting and organizing data.

Combining datasets in an analytics platform

BI solutions offer several options for automating data collection, such as data extraction tools and data integration platforms. Domo is one such solution, offering over 1,000 pre-built, low-code connectors that can pull data from a variety of sources on a reliable schedule, but other tools also exist on the market.

By incorporating automated data collection into their BI solutions, businesses can further optimize their analytics capabilities and realize significant cost savings, while benefiting from higher accuracy, increased efficiency, and improved timeliness.

2. Leveraging Cloud Computing

Leveraging cloud computing can be a game-changer for businesses looking to optimize their BI solutions and reduce costs. By storing and processing data in the cloud, businesses can benefit from increased flexibility and scalability, as well as reduced infrastructure costs. This is especially useful for businesses that have fluctuating data needs or limited IT resources.

Cloud-based BI solutions also provide unparalleled accessibility, as users can access data from any location and on any device. This ensures that decision-makers can access the data they need when they need it, without being tied to their physical office location or company device. This is increasingly important for businesses with remote workers or teams that operate in multiple locations.

Domo's analytics solution offer industry leading accessibility on the cloud
DOMO offers industry-leading accessibility through their cloud-native platform – accessible on mobile or desktop.

There are several cloud-based BI solutions available in the market, but Domo is the most cost-effective, user-friendly all-in-one data platform on the cloud. By leveraging Domo for their BI solutions, businesses can reduce costs, increase flexibility, and unlock the power of data analytics in a more efficient and scalable way.

3. Using BI Solutions to Easily Visualize and Collaborate on Your Data

Using BI solutions to simplify data analysis can unlock significant value for businesses by providing a streamlined and intuitive way to visualize, analyze and interpret data. This approach allows businesses to extract insights from their data more easily and quickly, which translates into improved decision-making and better outcomes.

The purpose of visualization tools is to help businesses easily understand and process large or complex data. This not only saves time, but enables users to identify trends and patterns that might have otherwise gone unnoticed from looking at raw data alone.

Business intelligence solutions in Domo make Visualizing Data and collaborating easier than ever
Gif by Domo.com

Moreover, simplifying dashboarding with user-friendly tools like Domo can also help businesses reduce costs by enabling business users to self-serve insights from their data. This means that organizations can focus IT resources on preparing clean datasets and let business users travel the last mile on their own to analyze and visualize data towards meaningful outcomes. The best business intelligence solutions enable all of your team members across the organization rather than continuing to rely on the back and forth between IT resources and business users to produce meaningful data strategies and actions.

4. Improving Data Accuracy: Increasing Efficiency and Reducing Costs

By increasing the accuracy of their data, businesses can reduce the risk of making decisions based on incorrect or incomplete information, which can ultimately result in costly mistakes.

BI solutions can offer several ways to improve data accuracy, such as real-time data tracking, automated data connection and transformation, and data governance tools for notifications when issues do arise. Deploying solutions like Domo that offer these features enables businesses to increase efficiency and reduce the costs associated with manual data cleaning and preparation.

Analytics solutions enable easy and automated data cleanup

Improving data accuracy can also help businesses avoid compliance issues, which can result in financial penalties or legal problems. It is essential to ensure that data accuracy is at the forefront of your BI strategy to reduce the chance of any potential compliance-related issues, and your business should be aware of what regulations your data is subject to before diving straight into your solutions.

5. Implementing Data Governance: Ensuring Data Compliance and Reducing Costs

Implementing data governance is a crucial step for businesses looking to optimize their BI solutions and ensure data compliance. Data governance involves establishing policies and procedures for managing data to ensure its accuracy, security, and privacy. By implementing an effective data governance strategy, businesses can minimize the risk of data breaches and non-compliance issues.

Domo offers many layers of data governance including Roles, PDPs (Row Level Permissions), Programmatic Filtering for Domo Everywhere (embedded analytics), Sandbox, and more.

Governance is made easy in Domo

Businesses that implement effective data governance strategies can better protect themselves from legal and regulatory consequences like GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA while enjoying the many benefits that BI solutions provide. If you’re nervous about setting up compliant business intelligence solutions, the Graphable team can help guide you in this domain!

Conclusion

In conclusion, Business Intelligence solutions have become crucial for businesses looking to stay competitive in today’s data-driven economy. By embracing cost-effective BI strategies, businesses can improve their analytics capabilities, make better decisions, and achieve better outcomes without burning a hole in their pockets.

Ultimately, the key to unlocking the power of BI solutions for cost-effective analytics is to focus on the right strategies, which are going to be unique to best fit your organization’s needs and priorities. By working with a trusted data analytics consulting firm like Graphable, businesses can overcome the challenges of implementing BI solutions and reap the rewards of data-driven decision-making.

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Graphable helps you make sense of your data by delivering expert data analytics consulting, data engineering, custom dev and applied data science services.

We are known for operating ethically, communicating well, and delivering on-time. With hundreds of successful projects across most industries, we have deep expertise in Financial Services, Life Sciences, Security/Intelligence, Transportation/Logistics, HighTech, and many others.

Thriving in the most challenging data integration and data science contexts, Graphable drives your analytics, data engineering, custom dev and applied data science success. Contact us to learn more about how we can help, or book a demo today.

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Additional discovery:

    We would also be happy to learn more about your current project and share how we might be able to help. Schedule a consultation with us today. We can also discuss pricing on these initial calls, including Neo4j pricing and Domo pricing. We look forward to speaking with you!


    Graphable helps you make sense of your data by delivering expert analytics, data engineering, custom dev and applied data science services.
     
    We are known for operating ethically, communicating well, and delivering on-time. With hundreds of successful projects across most industries, we have deep expertise in Financial Services, Life Sciences, Security/Intelligence, Transportation/Logistics, HighTech, and many others.
     
    Thriving in the most challenging data integration and data science contexts, Graphable drives your analytics, data engineering, custom dev and applied data science success. Contact us to learn more about how we can help, or book a demo today.

    We are known for operating ethically, communicating well, and delivering on-time. With hundreds of successful projects across most industries, we thrive in the most challenging data integration and data science contexts, driving analytics success.
    Contact us for more information: