Whether a company wants to improve customer service, increase the efficiency of marketing activities or its competitive advantage in a world in which customers and their needs are increasingly becoming the focus of strategic business considerations, sending the right data to the right person at the right time is essential.

That’s why analysis and reporting tools, such as Business Intelligence (BI), are high on the agenda when it comes to a company’s software initiatives. The term Business Intelligence (BI) refers to procedures and processes for systematic analysis, collection, evaluation and presentation of data in electronic form to gain insights that enable better operative and strategic decisions with regard to the company's goals, whereby a search-driven approach aims to optimize your business.

Hence, it is obvious that it makes sense to merge the strengths of BI and Big Data to meet the particularities of an end customer-centric strategy. In the case of use of an Enterprise Big Data Search system this is called "Search-driven Business Intelligence".

To see the benefits clearly, let’s take a look at the biggest challenges of traditional BI solutions:  Even specialists take days to generate a report; for most end users, the interfaces are too complex or technical; not to mention that there is a lack of self-service components, allowing users to drive evaluations independently without the need of a specialist.

Moreover, the exponential growth of unstructured data is a major hurdle for the traditional tools that struggle with data that is stuck in various formats such as text documents, emails, PDFs, social media, websites, video or audio file formats. Such ‘unstructured data’ couldn’t be used so far for analyzes and predictions, but hold deep knowledge and therefore enormous potential that was wasted till now.

Business Intelligence meets Big Data

Modern enterprise search technologies, such as Mindbreeze, make a Big Data Search possible that is designed to manage the fast data growth sustainably and can process the collected data in high speed. The Big Data Search can not only prepare structured but also unstructured data in a way that they are available to the enterprise-wide knowledge management at any time. The strengths of both worlds - business intelligence and big data -  merge to meet the particularities of an end customer-centric strategy.

Such a ‘search-driven BI’ solution is e.g. the Mindbreeze InSpire Appliance, that provides business decision-makers or department heads the following advantages, besides the ultrafast processing of unstructured data:

• Self-service BI: The search approach is so easy that even nontechnical end users can autonomouslyindependently of the IT department perform analyzes and create reports. This abundance of smart, highly automated and easy to use features allows that even laymen can use BI to get a 360-degree view of markets and consumers that helps them to improve customer service, increase the efficiency of marketing activities, or in general the competitive advantage, whereby the data flow can be configured in a way that the employees receive precisely the information they need for making their decisions.
• Machine or rather Deep Learning: Enterprise Search scores with semantic search, which means that the recognized context gets included in the analysis and structuring of the data. The longer the system is in use, the easier the detection of correlations.
• Queries do not follow a rigid scheme that has to be learned, but can be formulated in natural language, like in a web search engine.
• The data stays where generated although more than 450 connectors ensure that the different data sources and file formats can be integrated into the analysis.

Enterprise Search, the practice of making content from multiple enterprise-type sources searchable to a defined audience, seems to meet the demands of the digital transformation in many ways: First, the technology provides a stronger networking within the company as well as with partners and customers. On the other hand, Enterprise Search supports companies in benefitting from the increased networking advantages by the distributed data using semantic processes which understand the importance of information, and automated and intelligently connects them to new units of meaning, turning raw data into knowledge.

Hence, a search-driven business intelligence approach has many advantages: The time required by many processes is reduced enormously by the many intelligent, highly automated and easy to use features. The creation of reports by a few specialists is omitted because each user himself can generate a report with a search. Even the complexity of the operation decreases with Machine- and Deep Learning, and decision makers, department heads, and experts get hold of an easy-to-use technology.

For sure, the process optimization by Enterprise Search and the all-encompassing networking via the Internet of Things will increase the IQ of your company: You provide employees with the right knowledge at the right time in the right place, so that a significant improvement in efficiency can be achieved. Enterprise Search generates a panoramic view of the customer, consequently improving the interaction and customer loyalty.

By Daniela La Marca