In the aftermath of the Great Recession, an economy that is growing, but uncertain, has led to greater caution and thrift among consumers. As a result, even as many small to midsized businesses (SMBs) plan for growth, they continue to look for ways to improve efficiency and cut costs.
SMBs increasingly realize that having the right information and the tools to analyze that information is critical to making business decisions that can drive growth and improve productivity. Today, more information than ever is available about companies’ internal operations. This information is a by-product of companies’ successful efforts to automate their operations.
Business intelligence (BI) solutions provide a way to harness this ever increasing information in a way that allows companies to make better, smarter decisions of all types and ultimately outpace their competition. As a result, BI has emerged as one of the top IT priorities for SMBs.
As BI solutions have evolved, they have become less expensive and easier to implement and deploy, and will continue to do so, all good news for SMB’s. Indeed, BI vendors today, facing stagnant and over saturated enterprise markets, are increasingly shifting their focus to serving the SMB market. This is good even more good news for SMBs looking for BI solutions. Yet, challenges remain in terms of information accessibility, ease of use, and implementation.
This burgeoning SMB market for BI , mixed with the BI vendors attraction to the revenue potential it offers, fascinates me and I will be sharing some ideas here looking at how the BI industry will evolve over the next decade to address these challenges and how emerging technology is likely to enable vendors to further improve BI capabilities for SMB’s.
