Why Are Business Intelligence Concepts And BI Solutions So Important Today?

The Two Types of Decision-Making In Our Brain

Chess prodigy Joshua Waitzkin writes about this distinction in The Art of Learning: A Journey in the Pursuit of Excellence. In his book, Waitzkin states that the best chess players are those that can take in the most information in a short span of time. They do so using the “fast thinking” system of their brain.

Let us explain. As laid out by the Nobel winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow,  your brain has two different learning and decision making systems:

**Source: Readinggraphics.com

1. Slow But Accurate

You have a slow thinking system which you can think of as a spotlight of attention. You use this system when you really focus on and think about a problem step by step. This slow thinking system is very accurate. However, it can only process so much information at any one time and requires a lot of energy.

Many of us don’t use our slow thinking system for most decisions. Instead, we use our fast system, otherwise known as our intuition.

2. Fast But Error-Prone

Your fast thinking system can take in massive amounts of data at once. It can also make snap decisions very quickly, with pretty high accuracy. However, your fast thinking system has one big disadvantage. It is prone to logical fallacies and perceptual biases.

If your slow thinking system is like a spotlight, your fast thinking system is like the area of a picture that isn’t in focus. You don’t have to burn much energy to use it, but you don’t see things as clearly as you do with your slow thinking system.

The capabilities of your slow thinking system, or your spotlight of awareness, don’t seem to change very much as you gain expertise.

Similarly to how most people can only hold so many digits in their short term memory at once, your slow thinking system appears to have some biological limits.

Experts Have Better Pattern Recognition

At this point, you may be thinking, “This is all well and good, but how does it relate to expertise and business intelligence?” The key point here is that experts in a field are able to recognize and use vastly more information at once using their fast-thinking system than amateurs can.

As Waitzkin writes about it in “The Art of Learning,” a chess grandmaster can look at a board for a split second, and take in more useful information than an amateur can in minutes. Due to this greater informational processing ability, experts are able to use their slow thinking spotlight where it counts: on critical thinking and checking their biases.

You can view business intelligence as an extremely powerful data discovery tools that is an extension of your fast thinking mind.

This makes sense because business intelligence allows you to process exponentially more information than you would be able to otherwise. While you still need to do your homework and check everything using critical thinking, if you use business intelligence correctly, you’ll have an incredible competitive advantage over the other companies in your market.

Why Are Business Intelligence Concepts And BI Solutions So Important Today?

The importance of business intelligence is growing at the same pace the data is produced – which is becoming less and less fathomable for the normal human brain.

As mentioned: We live in a world rife with digital data, and without using it to your advantage, you will quickly fall behind the pack, which will render your empire obsolete in a matter of years.

But as powerful as digital data is for decision-making and improved business efficiency, it’s only advantageous if you know how to handle it the right way. That’s where today’s BI concepts come in.

To highlight the importance of business intelligence concepts in the modern age, here are the key benefits of embracing the power of BI:

1. They prevent you from drowning in data

The fact is, without business intelligence, you risk the very real possibility of drowning in data. Just look at these numbers: according to CloudTweaks, in 2015 there were 2.5 quintillion bytes of data produced daily. Do you know how much a quintillion is? It’s a 2.5 followed by 18 zeros. We have already entered the Zettabyte era, also mentioned as one of our techbuzz words for 2019, and, for scale, in 2012, the entire Internet only contained ½ of one zettabyte in data.

How’s that for exponential growth?

Depending on how you see it, this incredible amount of data is either a huge headache or the world’s greatest opportunity. On the one hand, there’s more possible useful information points out there than ever before. But, on the other hand, there’s much more noise standing in the way of you finding that useful signal than ever before.

2. They provide a wealth of insights

By utilizing BI concepts and solutions for your business, you’ll be able to extract a wealth of insights that will help improve interdepartmental and external communications, problem-solving processes, online data analysis, financial efficiency, goal-setting, marketing, and profitability.

3. Benchmarking is more accurate

By working with BI-based key performance indicators (KPIs), you’ll gain the ability to set actionable goals. In turn, this will accelerate your overall success by helping you to formulate strategies more effectively and work towards essential benchmarks more efficiently. By choosing and setting the right  KPI template for your business, you will be able to evaluate your goals and progress on a deeper and more accurate level.

4. You can predict your business future

Another key concept of business intelligence is the ability to predict future trends. The digestible patterns and information served up by online BI tools and solutions offer a viable means of predicting future outcomes and putting plans in place to either prevent calamities from occurring or take advantage of potential trends before your competitors.

5. They enable powerful data visualization

If you’re able to visualize your data with the help of online data visualization, making it digestible to the human eye, you’ll be able to tell a story with your insights and communicate your discoveries to others more effectively. Doing so will boost the success of your organization, making it more powerful than ever before. And BI solutions will help you do just that.

Business intelligence basics are crucial. They’re needed to cut through the noise, and get to the good stuff in the sea of data we all live in.