2019-04-17 Växjö Softhouse. Foto: Jonas Ljungdahl

Many companies have large amounts of unused data. Data that can contribute to better decisions and even new revenue streams, which is especially valuable in times of crisis. Starting to use Business Intelligence (BI) to achieve this is easier than many believe and a special strength is found in the combination of different types of data sources.

Business Intelligence gives companies in all different industries the opportunity to take advantage of their collected data and convert it to business value. It can be anything from buying and clicking behaviors to information from financial systems and if you combine your own data with, for example, public data, there are enormous insights to be gained, says Andreas Karlsson, BI developer at Softhouse who are experts in developing digital business through software, businesses and people.

– With public data that can include, for example, where people live, how old they are and what they earn, you can get even more of their own data. The combined data can then be used as a decision basis, which means that in his business, he can make smart fact-based decisions based on the best of the business, he explains.

Simple consolidation

The need for Business Intelligence, or visualization of data that you also say, is increasing as companies is investing more and more money in complex systems. The complexity can help you lose sight of your business. Softhouse can help its customers consolidate the data and create a neat and simple overall view. – Many still have data in several different places, in various systems, excel files and other documents. This we can consolidate and visualize through simple means and tools, ”says Magnus Gustafson, BI expert at Softhouse.

Andreas Karlsson says that the start-up often means an aha experience for the customer.

– Recently we would show a customer how easy it is to start with the BI tool Qlik Sense and we saw through it that they had an internal document system that began to behave strangely. We extracted log data from the system and in the first graph we obtained we could see that the number of accessed documents had increased tremendously over a number of days. It turned out that a person had started working from home with incorrect rights and happened to click that all documents would be made available offline. Start small and then scale up. The easiest way to get started with BI is to start with a concrete example of some type of small scale data. With the Qlik Sense tool you can evaluate freely for 30 days and then start a monthly subscription. Starting with their financial system is common, and this often leads to discovering more interesting areas to delve into.

– Investigating their license utilization with BI is a typical simple example that often provides great value. When you can visualize this in a dashboard, you get a stone’s eye and can release licenses that are not used and thus you save money, says Andreas Karlsson.

Self-service educations

When you start combining data sources to gain new insights, you can at a glance see trends in data. This can, for example, give the management team information about whether or not their actions have given effect, or show how even customers experience the service. This is something Softhouse helps its customers with, but customers can also easily create their own visualizations, explains Magnus Gustafson. “Self-service within BI is on the rise and we are getting more and more questions about how to make graphs ourselves. We welcome that and we are happy to arrange training with our customers, he concludes. Read more on DiDigital.se hereRead more here