As your business scales up and grows, it can be hard to figure out just where some of your problems are coming from. Of course, any larger business operation will be more complicated to manage, but size alone isn’t the root cause of most problems larger enterprises face. In fact, while size may exacerbate some issues, the cause for these obstacles in the first place can often be traced to inefficient systems or practices that could be just as present in small businesses as larger companies.

Some of the toughest problems your business may face as it gets bigger involve how information is passed from one department to the next. While on its face this sounds a bit like a communication issue, in fact, data management often plays just as large a role in these sorts of problems. This is why choosing the right business intelligence platform can be so important to the overall success and sustainability of your company. In fact, sometimes business intelligence can be a key component of solving some of the toughest problems your company faces. Read on to learn a bit more about the ways business intelligence can benefit companies small and large.

It can help businesses investigate human resources and performance issues

One of the most difficult areas to improve has to do with employee performance. Performance reviews are notoriously difficult to handle with objectivity, and yet, without an objective way to measure performance, it’s difficult to determine whether a member of your team is just having a rough week or has truly started to burn out. With the right business intelligence tools, you can leverage a variety of historical data points about any given employee in order to fully understand how they’re handling their workload and when and how they’re able to go above and beyond.

For example, if you’ve recently reorganized your team of sales reps to focus on specific geographic regions, business intelligence can help you have a better understanding of what each team’s typical output is. Of course, holidays and other vacation time may wind up affecting that sort of output, so it’s best to look at an average of several months of performance before making any major decisions based on that specific team. The last thing you want is to bank on a team that’s been selling an average of one hundred units a month in a particular region to suddenly sell two hundred units in the lead up to Christmas when you can anticipate many team members taking time off to be with family. Regardless of the type of vendor your business is, that’s just not good business practice. Business intelligence doesn’t just help you better understand how your team works, it helps you understand how to best utilize them to achieve your overall goals.

When you better manage your data, you make better decisions more quickly

Data management is a key part of business intelligence. If you’re relying on a data warehouse or having different business leaders export and import data about their sales or customers, you’re not just wasting time—you’re also risking data protection and consistency. Data virtualization is one way to address these problems, by serving as a bridge between different existing systems and offering a singular access point to get the data a vendor needs to thrive.

While something like the GigaOM data virtualization white paper is a great source for even more in-depth information about the ways that data virtualization and other methodologies can play a role in solving your business’ problems, the gist is that virtualization is a powerful aspect of modern data management strategies. Once you’ve eliminated the tedious and error-prone nature of managing your data repository inefficiently, you’ll likely be astonished by the way that your business grows. Whether it’s having a better handle on your analytics or connecting social media behavior with a customer’s CRM account, there are so many ways that cloud computing and ad-hoc access to your data can help business users, vendors, and decision-makers alike.

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