Survey: Role of Business Analytics Increasing Significantly

Over the past five years, business analytics have become increasingly essential for business leaders and decision-makers. This trend leads us to new survey results from Clutch, showing more than half of respondents (54 percent) strongly believe that business intelligence (BI) analytics play an important role in their company.

Further, 89 percent of users say the importance of data in their jobs has increased significantly over the past 12 months.

BI data is being used across businesses, but the data shows the departments seeing the most benefit are logistics/operations (58 percent), marketing (52 percent) and sales (52 percent).

“Sales and marketing are the largest users. Their decisions directly affect multiple categories, such as research and development and customer service,” says Carl Paluszkiewicz of Denologix, one of the survey respondents.

Cloud adoption is one reason businesses are able to embrace BI data, the report noted. It has allowed companies to scale more easily and paved the way for more affordable data analysis solutions.

The top three benefits of analyzing BI data are improved efficiency (26 percent), data management (25 percent) and business strategy development (18 percent).

Paluszkiewicz noted how BI data can have a direct impact on business decisions and enable leaders to make better decisions.

“Leaders have to make a lot of big decisions. They require facts to reassure them that they are making the right decisions,” Paluszkiewicz wrote. “For example, C-level marketing people often know the answer, but they need to prove it. The faster they can prove a new strategy’s effectiveness, the faster they can go to market.”

Leveraging Marketing Technology is a Top Priority in 2016

According to a March 2016 report by Black Ink, marketing technology will continue to play a key role as marketers look to develop more robust infrastructure and analytics capabilities.

The survey data shows marketers’ top priorities are a customer-centric focus (79 percent) and brand management (70 percent). However, nearly half of the survey’s respondents (46 percent) indicated access to more advanced analytics – and the insight that brings to make smarter decisions – is an obstacle. To address this issue, respondents named business intelligence reporting tools as the top marketing technology they are likely to purchase in 2016.