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10 Business Intelligence Trends Zoho Analytics Can Help You With In 2023

Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends Zoho Analytics Enhances in 2023

10 Business Intelligence Trends Zoho Analytics Can Help You With In 2023

Business intelligence has been completely revolutionized in the past decade. Data has become big and everyone has started using the power of the cloud. The BI landscape is developing and the future of business is now playing a big role. 

In 2023, BI tools and strategies will become more and more customized. Businesses of all sizes are not asking if there is a need for increased access to business intelligence analytics but what is the best BI solution for specific needs.

It is best to think of business intelligence as the combination of business analytics, data mining, data visualization, data tools, and infrastructure along with some best practices that can help organizations to make more data-driven decisions. The BI trends coming in the near future are all set to prepare businesses to become more connected, hyper-scale, and data-driven.

In this blog, we will see the top 10 business intelligence trends that Zoho Analytics can help you with within 2023. However, let us first start by gaining a better understanding of what is business intelligence software. 

What is Business Intelligence Software?

Business Intelligence software is a tool or an application that is equipped with modern technologies including AI and ML for transforming data into actionable insights without spending any effort. The BI tool can be used for converting raw data into purposeful insights so that it is easy to understand them, use them, and share them for improving business operations. 

Business intelligence is essentially about putting your data to use for the purpose of making data-driven decisions. It empowers organizations to make decisions based on data instead of assumptions. A BI tool can be used in the following ways:

1. Understanding Data

You can understand the business data in a much better way using data visualization and finding underlying trends in much lesser time. 

2. Analyzing Business Performance

You can measure and monitor business performance in detail along with advanced data analytics technologies while generating actionable insights. 

3. Business Growth

Business intelligence software allows you to scale your business to the next level with forecasts on business growth, making timely decisions, and planning your strategies. 

Zoho Analytics is a business intelligence software that can help you with crunching large quantities of data, visualizing important data, optimizing business operations, growing a business, cutting down expenses, and getting actionable insights that can be useful for making decisions.

Importance of Business Intelligence

It is important for all businesses to make a good sense of what is happening at a specific point in time and capable business intelligence tools are useful in telling a story. Rather than going by the gut, BI can be helpful in building data-driven organizations. It can be useful for offering valuable and actionable insights into data.

In this period of Big Data, businesses need functional BI software that is capable of solving all kinds of business intelligence needs. BI software is an important component of any business and its processes. The overall effectiveness of BI software is in how simple it can be to deploy, to use and how much value it can offer with hidden insights.

Top 10 Business Intelligence Zoho Analytics Can Help With

Top 10 Business Intelligence Zoho Analytics Can Help With

1. Self-service ETL

There was a time when ETL analytics capabilities were only considered to be a luxury for large enterprises. In today’s time, they are supported as a self-serviceable layer within the modern BI workflows democratizing the self-service ETL for all BI users. 

In addition, the low-code and no-code interfaces also provide prebuilt capabilities that give users a better start on data transformations. This also enables comprehensive data customization. 

The modern ETL layer can be engineered for pro-code users as well so that it supports complex data transformations as lightweight and self-serviceable capabilities. Moreover, BI vendors offer easy cloud data scalability while shouldering data management responsibilities that feel to the user. 

2. Unified Business Analytics

As there is an escalation in business app adoption in daily business operations, there is an increasing need for end-to-end analytics that can overcome data silos and offer a comprehensive view of business operations. 

Unified business analytics is like the underlining principle with which most businesses can easily blend data from different sources to be analyzed for cross-functional insights. There can be powerful native integrations between analytics platforms and business applications as an important data consolidation effort. 

The unified business analytics platforms can also include domain-specific NLP capabilities that can help users to unearth deeper and more powerful insights almost instantly.

3. Artificial Intelligence in BI

AI capabilities are quickly changing across the BI stack. This is valid from the data import stage to sharing of data insights. Capabilities such as automatic data modelling simplify the data preparation at any time when a large volume of raw data gets imported. 

In addition to historic analysis, predictive analysis is also gaining quick pace in the market because users are now able to choose from an array of ML-powered and pre-built custom prediction models for the data. 

Cognitive analytics is also rising in prominence while bringing powerful and human-like intelligence to the BI workflows with capabilities such as automated insights and recommendations. 

Particularly with the use of recommendations, BI platforms are now becoming the main theme and are moving from sharing data insights to guiding the stakeholders through decision-making.

4. Insights Bots

There has been a surge in AI-powered bots in the recent past and the BI world has embraced it massively. The BI bots can interact with users and help them perform operations such as data searches, visualizations, and other computations. 

Moreover, the bots also offer tailor-made suggestions with deep ML capabilities while customizing the experience for each and every user. This is the capability that can go a long way in democratizing BI for users at all possible levels. 

The BI platforms are also in favor of embedding bots into various channels such as Slack and Microsoft Teams so that they can be natively invoked from application users. The native deployment of an intelligent assistant called Ask Zia in the Slack channel is a common theme. 

5. Data Science and Machine Learning In BI

Data science and machine learning capabilities have now become natively available within the BI workflows. These capabilities are relevant to all data scientists and developers who are looking to carry out complex and in-depth data analysis with the deployment of trained ML models. 

For this purpose, the self-serviceable AutoML frameworks in modern BI platforms can offer a range of pre-built ML models to give users a better start on the analysis. This capability will instantly find appropriate ML models for being used on the basis of data imported. 

The users can also implement custom ML models inside the BI platforms and seamlessly integrate the BI software with the third-party DSML platforms. Significant efforts are being made to ensure that these capabilities continue increasing. 

6. Data Storytelling

One of the emerging trends that are opening the BI space to creative communication is called data storytelling. The prime objective is to humanize the overall experience of offering data insights with better context and empathy for stakeholders so that improved data-driven decisions can be taken. 

For better data presentation, the BI platforms allow users to make the most out of creative elements such as texts, images, audio, video, and the simple ability to embed code with data stories. 

Presentations, website portals, and infographics are popular methods of creating data stories. The data storytelling capabilities are also offered as a part of the business intelligence stack by many popular BI platforms.

7. Embedded Analytics

Embedded analytics has been one of the top business intelligence trends for some time now. The BI vendors can continue to innovate to offer a natural and cohesive BI experience for users anytime they live. 

In addition to embedding the BI stack, it is also possible to embed some layers just as needed. Using contextual embedding, users can rebrand their analytics platforms using customizable components that can reflect a brand’s look and feel. These are the components that include logos, CSS customizations, URLs, etc. 

A strong suite of APIs can shorten development cycles as embedded analytics is gaining more popularity among independent software vendors looking to embed a BI stack in the software offering. 

8. Data Governance

The concept of data governance refers to a set of processes, policies, and roles that ensure appropriate creation, valuation, consumption, and control of business data at a strategic level. 

Data governance establishes roles about who can manipulate the data in which situations and with which tools so that everything can be secure and efficient when it comes to data management. Companies of all sizes can be exposed to attacks and breaches while leaving huge amounts of sensitive information from customers, employees, suppliers, etc. 

Implementation of a well-crafted governance plan can help organizations in staying compliant with government regulations while also setting the right setting for using quality data and achieving goals. 

In the present competitive business environment where the amount of data keeps increasing each second, data governance has become a mandatory practice. A strategically implemented governance framework can assist organizations in staying compliant and minimizing risks, reducing costs, improving communication, and achieving strategic goals. 

9. Data Literacy

With data becoming the foundation of strategic decisions for businesses of all sizes, the ability to understand it and use it as a tool in organizations has become important for success. Data literacy will be a relevant data analytics trend to look out for in 2023. 

It is best to understand data literacy to understand, read, write, and communicate data in a context. This means understanding the techniques for analyzing data along with the tools implemented. Data literacy is essential for driving success. 

Given the rise of self-service tools, data literacy continues to be the foundation of a successful data-driven culture. Business leaders can offer the required training to an organization so that everyone can be empowered to work with data and analytics.

For achieving a successful data literacy process, a detailed assessment of skills should be done to find any gaps. You can start with finding data users as mediators for non-skilled groups and finding communication barriers when data fails its purpose. With this knowledge, the creation of targeted training becomes easy. 

10. Natural Language Processing

Natural Language Processing is a trend in business intelligence that is changing the manner in which companies go about their analytical processes. It is a powerful branch of AI that allows computers to understand, learn, and interpret human language in a spoken form.

NLP can be divided into two subsets called natural language understanding and natural language generation. NLU focuses on understanding the meaning of text and speech and NLG focuses on text generation on specific data input. 

Businesses have started adopting the technology of NLP for managing big amounts of unstructured text data that is gathered from different sources such as emails, social media, and surveys. Many BI software providers are also offering language insight features to users. 

It is safe to say that NLP is a business intelligence trend that is expected to develop in many areas in the coming years. BI software uses the capability of a self-service approach for gaining a competitive edge by offering users a way to conduct efficient analysis without calculations. 

Related Read: A Complete Overview of Zoho Analytics

BI Innovation Made Easy with Zoho Analytics

To ensure that continue making the most out of your Zoho Analytics efforts, it is necessary to ensure that emerging trends in the BI market are monitored and strategies are implemented effectively. The BI trends provide an outline of what the future of BI might look like and also offer a strong foundation for implementing BI for your business. 

Zoho Analytics is one of the best platforms for implementing BI trends. In case you are not already using the benefits that Zoho Analytics is capable of offering then it is time that you already start doing that. Zoho keeps a consistent watch on emerging customer needs and addresses them for transforming how users analyze data and make decisions. 

BI Innovation Made Easy with Zoho Analytics

Top 10 Business Intelligence Trends Zoho Analytics Enhances in 2023 Read More »

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A Complete Overview of Zoho Analytics | Encaptechno

A Complete Overview of Zoho Analytics

A Complete Overview of Zoho Analytics | Encaptechno


Zoho Analytics is one of the finest
self-service BI and data analytics software that allows you to analyze data, create amazing data visualizations, and discover hidden insights within minutes. It provides cutting edge analytical solutions that are needed to transform raw data into actionable insights. 

Zoho Analytics also allows users to fetch data from any data source and analyze it visually for making informed and data-driven decisions. In addition, it also allows the user to easily share insights and collaborate. 

A great feature about Zoho Analytics software is that it allows the users to create visualizations and dashboards to present data via a quick, easy and self-service model. It also brings detailed insights and analysis to an organization’s business data on demand without any help of IT assistants or data analysts through extensive automation efforts all across the analytical process.

The users can crunch large datasets, clean and blend data, perform different analytical tasks and also visualize the results in dynamic graphics to extract insights. They can also make informed decisions in a stand-alone or embedded environment with the support of mobile devices. Additionally, it comes with a flexible on-premise and cloud deployment model. 

Features of Zoho Analytics

 

1. Data Integration


Data Integration - Features of Zoho Analytics
You can get your data analyzed wherever it may be using over 250+ data sources of Zoho Analytics. You can connect to data from files, feeds, web URLs, databases, business applications, and much more. 

  • Files and Feeds: Zoho Analytics allows you to upload data from spreadsheets and flat files such as Microsoft Excel, HTML, CSV, XML, JSON, text files and more. The data can be easily fed from online storage services such as Zoho Docs, Box, Dropbox, Microsoft OneDrive, etc. It is easy to pull data from web URL feeds. 
  • Databases: You can connect with popular business applications in Sales, Marketing, Finance, Help Desk, IT, HR, and many more with the ready-made connectors. 
  • Custom Apps: Zoho Analytics software offers powerful data import and integration APIs for building a connector quickly, and getting data from any offline/online application for analysis. 

2. Data Preparation and Management


Data Preparation and Management - Features of Zoho Analytics
You can use the self-service data and management application called Zoho DataPrep very easily with Zoho Analytics. This is a good way to get your data cleansed, transformed, enriched for easy and better analysis.

  • Auto Model: Zoho Analytics is a business intelligence software that automatically identifies data types. You can get suggestions for joining datasets and create custom data types for identifying and fixing invalid data. 
  • Smart Cleanse: You can filter and cleanse data using intelligent suggestions. Improve the quality of your data by removing duplicates and invalid entries. 
  • Transform: You can format and change your data without any need for coding. This will also help you reshape your data using over 250+ functions like summary, pivot, unpivot, etc.
  • Enrich Data: Zoho Analytics also allows you data with ML/AI-powered transforms such as sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, language detection and more.
  • Catalog Data: The use of Zoho Analytics software also enables you to manage your datasets by categories, custom tags, data readiness, data quality, and more. You can also use the search capabilities of Zia which is Zoho’s smart AI assistant for performing system-wide metadata searches.

3. Visual Analysis


Collaborative Analysis - Features of Zoho Analytics
The
data visualization is one of the best features of Zoho Analytics. With the use of this feature, it is possible to slice and dice your data while analyzing it visually with a wide range of visualization tools. 

  • Visualization Options: Zoho Analytics allows you to use a wide range of charts, widgets, summary, pivot, and tabular views for creating insightful reports and dashboards. 
  • Drag and Drop Report Creation: Zoho Analytics also enables the effortless creation of meaningful reports and dashboards with the intuitive drag and drop interface. 
  • Tabbed Dashboards: With Zoho Analytics, many reports can be combined into tabbed dashboards using a drag and drop designer. You can insert images, formatted texts, web components and widgets in a flexible designer layout. You can make this easy for your executives and users to track KPIs effectively.
  • Dynamic and Interactive: Zoho Analytics is a reports and dashboards BI software that allows you to use a wide range of interactive options such as view underlying data, drill down, contextual filters and many more for performing ad-hoc exploratory analysis. 
  • Geo Visualization: You can analyze your geographical data with interactive map charts. You can compare and measure key metrics across countries, regions, states, postal codes, and latitudes and longitudes.
  • Image-Based Visualizations: Zoho Analytics helps in plotting location data spread over custom image boundaries such as basketball courts, city parking lots, roads, etc. This includes image visuals in your reports to enhance visual appeal and readability.

4. Augmented Analytics


Zoho
Analytics software augments your analysis of data with the technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, natural language processing and generation, and getting quick insights from your data. 

  • Zia Insights: It is possible to get contextual and actionable insights that go way beyond visualizations in the form of digestible narrations with zero interactions. 
  • Conversational Analytics: Zoho Analytics allows you to engage in colloquial conversations with Ask Zia so that you can get relevant reports as answers. 
  • Automated Reports: With a single click, you can generate a valuable set of auto-generated reports on whatever data you may have when you are beginning your analysis.
  • Predictive Analytics: You can also apply custom forecast models and forecast values of business metrics while predicting the upcoming trends. 
  • What if Analysis: Zoho Analytics helps in simulating complex scenarios, and finding optimal business outcomes with the use of what-if analysis. 
  • Data Alerts: With the Zoho Analytics self-service BI, you can get notified automatically on important changes to your KPIs, anomalies, goal achievement, etc. This helps in staying on top of your business. 

5. Unified Business Insights


It is possible to unify the business data across an organization from various functions such as marketing, support, finance, sales, etc. You can easily analyze this unified data and unearth end to end insights.

  • Easy Connectors: Connect to 50+ popular business applications within a few clicks. Auto-sync and unify data from various business applications in hourly intervals only.
  • Pre-built Analytics: Zoho Analytics software helps you instantly begin your analytics journey with much valuable pre-built visualization that offer a comprehensive view of business health. You can build your own ad hoc reports and dashboards to suit your specific needs perfectly.
  • Data Blending: Zoho Analytics also helps in the automatic blending of data from various applications. It is also possible to define metrics that span across the data from multiple departments. You can create reports and dashboards with these metrics and offer end to end insights across a business. 

6. Collaborative Analysis


Zoho Analytics is a
business intelligence software that makes collaboration an important part of data analytics. You can easily democratize data, allow pervasive BI and analytics in your organization.

  • Share Reports and Dashboards: Zoho Analytics allows you to share reports and dashboards that you create with your colleagues, and collaborate with them.
  • Best Access Control: You have complete control over what your colleagues can see and do with the data and reports that you share with them. The fine access control with specific options such as read-only, read-write, report authoring, export, and drill down is excellent assistance. 
  • Easy Commenting: Zoho Analytics helps you to share contextual comment threads and instantly collaborates with peers on a report or dashboard. You can add and annotate images or go back to see the entire document history anytime and anywhere. 
  • Printing and Emailing: With the use of Zoho Analytics, it is also possible to schedule your reports and dashboards to be emailed automatically. You can export and print reports for offline access as well. 

7. Data Storytelling


Zoho Analytics allows you to tell interesting stories by using the data. You can present and publish analytical insights in the context of familiar business workflows. This will make the process of
data analytics a lot more efficient and enjoyable. 

  • Slideshows: Zoho Analytics is an excellent tool to craft immersive analytics presentations with the use of Zoho Show, an online presentation service. You can add rich narratives in the form of text, images, shapes, etc along with reports and dashboards. This helps in weaving data stories to your audience.
  • Web Portals: You can create purpose-built data analytics portals using the site builder called Zoho Sites. This will make it easy and exclusive for your users to analyze the data with visualizations.
  • Ask Zia: It is possible to embed the AI assistant of Zoho Analytics called Ask Zia along with Zia insights anywhere in the business workflow. You can allow data-driven decision making at all endpoints.

8. Mobility


Zoho Analytics helps in accessing and interacting with data, reports, and dashboards from phones and tablets. 

  • Mobile Applications: It is possible to access and interact with the reports and dashboards that you have created in Zoho Analytics on the move from your iOS and Android powered mobile devices.
  • Dashboards Application: This one is a purpose-built and immersive mobile application to access and explore the dashboards that you have in Zoho Analytics. Creative features support the inviting fluid interaction and analysis. 
  • Conversational Analytics: This feature allows you to speak with Zia on the go. You can ask questions and get precise insights as answers in the form of reports and widgets.
  • Mobile Collaboration: Zoho Analytics helps you add comments to reports, and hold meaningful conversations with your peers. 

9. Embedded Business Intelligence


Embedded Business Intelligence - Features of Zoho Analytics
Using Zoho
Analytics software, you can offer a white-labelled BI and analytics application under your brand name. You can also set up a standalone analytics portal and embed it within your application. 

  • Embedded Analytics: It is possible to integrate a full-featured analytics platform within an application using the single sign-on API and SAML authentication.
  • Self Service Analytics Portal: You can set up a rebranded analytics portal and customize it with rich design elements while seamlessly making it accessible with the use of web and native mobile applications. 
  • Augmented Business Intelligence: Zoho’s smart AI assistant called Zia can be easily embedded for getting automated insights from any reports and dashboards. You can take advantage of Zoho Analytics by using features such as smart forecasting and ML-based predictive analysis.

10. Security and Governance


Zoho
Analytics software is used by strong Zoho security practices including the support for redundancy, backup, confidentiality, and privacy. This helps in ensuring that the data is safe and secure. 

  • Data Security: Zoho Analytics has a privacy by design model which allows the customers to have better control over the data. The time tested and accredited enterprise grade security features and governance framework makes sure that continuous data is managed.
  • Data Backup: The data can be stored in Zoho Analytics cloud version and it can be backed up each day in the data centres. You can do a periodic backup as well.
  • Roles: The users, viewers, and administrators role at the workplace, organization, and accountant labels are present. There is a clear segregation on who can do what based on the roles.
  • Logging: Zoho Analytics software offers all user activity and access within the application. Hence, it is possible to know which user logged in at what time, which user has access to which functions and much more. All this ensures security and accountability while the auditing is going on.

11. Deployments


You can effectively deploy Zoho Analytics according to the needs that you have. It is also possible to subscribe to Zoho Analytics cloud, and install it on premise in your servers. It can also be deployed in public clouds such as Azure, Google, and AWS. Lastly, you can also use the white labeled version of Zoho Analytics.

  • Cloud: Zoho Analytics offers easy access to a full fledged self service BI and analytics service that is hosted in Zoho Cloud with just a browser and a mobile application. There is no upfront cost and you can pay as you go ahead with either monthly subscriptions or a yearly lock in.
  • Onpremise: You can easily install Zoho Analytics behind the firewalls and on your own servers. This also helps you analyze the data in house. 
  • Public Cloud: Zoho Analytics software can be deployed on the public cloud of your choice. This is similar to AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. 
  • Embedded: Zoho Analytics offers a complete analytics application in your brand name. There is a choice to either go with the standalone analytics portal or an embedded one with your own application. The white-labelled version is available in the cloud and on-premise models both.

12. Extensibility and Elasticity


Zoho Analytics is an excellent
data analytics application that is a full-fledged, scalable, and powerful analytics platform. It helps the developers and system integrators to develop and deploy custom analytics applications and integrations. 

  • APIs: You can use a robust set of APIs for the purpose of authorization, custom styling, data integration, and dynamic reportings embedding to build custom analytical applications of integrations. This also allows you to maximize the potential of extensible low code or no-code integration with a tech stack. 
  • Zoho Marketplace: You can choose to complement your analytical abilities with a wide range of analytical applications available in the Zoho partner driven Marketplace. There are domain-specific and purpose-built native analytics applications also available in third-party marketplaces.
  • Big Data: Zoho Analytics allows you to analyze your big data with ease and derive key business insights. The data can be present in big data sources such as relational, NoSQL and cloud databases or popular business applications. 

Conclusion


Zoho Analytics is designed to benefit businesses from deep analytics using data interpretations, auto-generation of reports and other such features that can help in automatically blending data from various apps for cross-functional analysis. This helps the user to get a comprehensive view of the business. 

The implementation of Zoho Analytics can help you derive business metrics and capture key performance indicators as well. You can plan for future events with forecasting and predictive capabilities, ask questions and get analysis from Zia, and do much more.

If you haven’t already got Zoho Analytics implemented, now is the time to get in touch with a certified Zoho partner such as Encaptechno and get things going. You will be amazed at what all you can do with the use of Zoho Analytics and how it can benefit your business. 

 

A Complete Overview of Zoho Analytics Read More »

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