More and more, cloud-based solutions are easy to integrate into one another, allowing for the free exchange of information between systems. While this helps with the flow of data between different solutions, it does not give humans the ability to visualize the data to make better business decisions.
A business intelligence tool, or BI tool for short, is a centralized solution that allows you to gain a 360-degree view of all the data going in and out of your organization. If you think of each component in your tech stack as a spoke on a wheel, your BI tool is the hub that holds the integrity of the wheel together.
The use of BI tools is quickly becoming a mainstay to help businesses make sense of their data. In fact, Dresner’s 2019 Cloud Computing and Business Intelligence Report found that 48% of respondents cited the implementation of a cloud-based BI solution as an important part of company growth. With that in mind, let’s look at the role of big data in forecasting a business’ future, how a BI tool helps you make sense of that data, and where you might see the benefits of a BI tool as a background screening professional.
Big data: the fuel for informed business decisions
There is a ton of information available at our fingertips today—IBM has found that a staggering 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created on the internet every single day. From a business standpoint, these are heaps and mounds of consumer interactions and trends that can help you understand what it is that the market wants or needs. If you can identify those pieces of insight that beckon for a change in your industry, in theory, your business could be the one ahead of the curve and be a disruptor in the space.
But it’s not just “the internet” that is producing these colossal mines of data—your business is, too. Deep within your tech stack lives data that tells the story of your customer. These points of data could be your company’s answer to increased customer engagement and retention, improved operational efficiency, and heightened profits overall.
However, excavating usable data from these solutions can be a massive undertaking:
- Disparate systems make it hard to connect the dots: When you have vital information stored in numerous siloed solutions, it can be nearly impossible to see the big picture, and crucial data may even slip through the cracks.
- Difficulty disseminating and collaborating on data: If stakeholders are constantly having to swivel between applications or are limited in their access to data, communication across a broad group can begin to break down.
- Manually analyzing data is a waste of resources: Even with expert data scientists pouring over raw data, the number of man hours wasted digging up trends and insights delivers a deep wound to your ROI.
While all of this data is an extremely exciting prospect for businesses to sink their teeth into, these millions of morsels of data are not exactly the most digestible material for the human mind to understand. You need a solution that can cut through the noise and help you see the information that matters to you most in a convenient and collaborative format.
Bridging the information gap with business intelligence tools
Humans at the most fundamental level are visual, pattern-seeking creatures. We look for repetition and trends to help guide our decision-making process, and these traits do not lend themselves well to the analysis of raw data. That’s where the concept of business intelligence comes in.
Business intelligence is a technology-driven process used to analyze and interpret data to help people make better, more informed decisions. Business intelligence tools allow you to capture data from a myriad of sources and dynamically manipulate, analyze, and interpret it unearth unique views and perspectives that would have been impossible to achieve using traditional reporting methods. It also allows for seamless cross-referencing and collaboration of any team, breaking down barriers in departmental data access. In essence, a BI solution acts as the single source of truth for all of your sources of data, allowing for near-instantaneous analysis of any dataset within the organization.
Some of the benefits of implementing a BI tool for your business include:
- Real-time monitoring – Get up-to-the-second updates on operational data to make quick yet informed choices for the business
- Reporting – Gather information from a multitude of sources and get information for countless scenarios and situations.
- Dashboards – Typically highly customizable, dashboards let users across the organization see relational data on an easy-to-use interface.
- Scorecards – Easily reference business KPIs and goals against any combination of information.
- Mobile – Access data monitoring, reporting, and dashboards on the go.
The effect of BI tools in the CRA industry
Every sector of business, from restaurants to finance to medical and beyond, are jumping headlong into the benefits of big data. Auto insurance company Root has captured over one billion miles in driver data to coax the auto insurance industry into a more customer-centric model. Streaming service Netflix is using its data to better understand which kind of content is popular with certain demographics and regions to provide a better user experience to its customers.
The professional background screening industry is also a space that is rife with consumer data. In reality, the entire industry would be all but useless without a healthy access to consumer data. However, there’s nearly endless data out there to sift through, and so far, there hasn’t been a BI tool designed with the business problems of background screening professionals in mind, until now.
TazWorks Insights was created in partnership with analytics company Numetric to meet the needs of Taz customers looking for advanced analytics. Use Insights to quickly and efficiently analyze your screening activities, including search volumes, cost & profitability, personnel productivity, processing times, and more.
TazInsights is a simple, yet powerful solution that provides you with a suite of tools to help screening professionals improve overall business operations:
- Custom dashboards and reports let you customize your dashboards and reports to deliver the insights your team needs to increase efficiencies and improve profit margins.
- Third-party integration Whether you want to combine your TazWorks data with Quickbooks or Salesforce data to combine operational data with sales, or with Jira data to analyze support data and operations data together, TazWorks Insights connectors allow you to create your ideal, company-wide platform.
- Client-base cloud portals: Now you can deliver all the real-time visibility your end users want in a branded, cloud-based portal made just for them. They will love the ease of seeing definitively the value you are creating for them, and you will love their increased loyalty to your agency.
- Data security All of these features are provided with the utmost concern for security. While your end users can easily view data pertaining to their projects, their data remains safe from prying eyes of any other users, thanks to row-level security.
Research giant Gartner describes business intelligence as “the applications, infrastructure and tools, and best practices that enable access to and analysis of information to improve and optimize decisions and performance.” BI tools have become such an integral part of the operation of a business today that foregoing the adoption of such a solution would certainly spell out irrelevancy for any organization that resists its impact.
