Introducing data analysis tools into your SMB could give your company a significant advantage. These tools help executives and employees to gain deeper insights into the real state of their business and market. Today’s business environment produces a lot of unstructured data; the challenge for executives is how to turn that data into something useful and actionable. IT administrators can assist the process by taking information about services, product development, marketing, sales, and social networking and integrating it with a useful analytics solution.
Integrating Analytics
A good starting point is working out what input data are important to executives and employees and which data analysis tools will help them to get the insight they need. The best way to find out is to observe the business to find out what information people search for and what kind of reporting employees have to deliver. This will provide a head start in identifying, installing, and configuring the right kind of business intelligence software package.
Getting Deeper Insights
Once that is done, employees and executives can easily gain insight into what is happening in the business. There are many kinds of insights that data analysis tools can provide. These might include historical analysis of past business actions, descriptive analysis to map what is happening now, or predictive modeling of future trends and scenarios. Executives can also use business intelligence tools to look for similarities that might help them to improve operational efficiency and plan future business strategy.
Social Data Integration
In addition, the right data analysis tools can help businesses to harness the data generated by social networking interactions on a daily basis.This can be a goldmine for midsize enterprises, as it reveals key metrics about a company’s success in engaging and influencing customers and managing their online reputation. It can also help them assess the success of promotional and marketing campaigns to work out whether they are reaching target customers and delivering what those customers want. This kind of analytics insight is invaluable in helping a small business to grow, and IT administrators are at the heart of the process.
Cultural Change
The use of data analysis tools can bring about a cultural change within the midsize enterprise. With information moving out of silos and becoming more freely shared, employees can feel more engaged with and committed to the goals of the business. They are also more empowered to deliver their part of those goals. Businesses also become better able to respond quickly to customer feedback; as a result, they enhance customer engagement and improve their reputation.
IT administrators can help to make this happen by educating users about the business intelligence (BI) system and the kinds of reporting and analysis it can provide. In fact, in the long term, administrators may even see their role start to shift away from networking and storage to playing a larger part in analyzing data.
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