With guided search, the likes of Google and Bing have made it exceedingly simple for anyone to access information. But what if the same simplicity could be extended to business users to analyze their organization's data? This blog will discuss how Search Bars are the future of business analytics.
A Search Bar in Business Analytics?
Analyzing a company's business data by typing it into a search bar is quite appealing. First, it connects business stakeholders directly to their data. It shortens the time to generate actionable insights.
The simplicity of search with AI-generated recommendations will guide business users in their journey to explore data and extract meaningful insights. This helps organizations increase their analytics adoption and significantly reduce the time to gain insights.
How does a Search Bar work in Business Analytics?
The future of business analytics lies in large-scale data mining and pattern recognition to generate faster, actionable insights. The major challenge is that the people who consume and create insights differ. This needs to be clarified. Business stakeholders get reports and insights outside what they seek.
Because of its simplicity of use, the search bar attempts to reduce the gap between data and business users.
Whenever a user types anything on the search bar, the analytics platform shows a drop-down with keywords starting with the same letters that business users have typed. Subsequently, the platform displays insights corresponding to what has been ranked in the search bar. The platform also recommends further dimensional cuts or metrics that users should type to delve deeper into the analysis. Finally, it presents data visually, allowing business users to identify trends and patterns, aiding informed business decisions. This is best illustrated by the following example:
Let's say a clothing franchise has multiple stores in different countries. The company's business analyst wants to know the average revenue generated in each store in each country.
To get the required data, he can type "Average Revenue by store by country" in the search bar. The business analytics platform will fetch the required details. He can further segregate the data based on category, SKU, etc., by typing it again on the search bar.
How is Search-Driven Analytics different?
Until now, business analytics has been all about endlessly looking at tables and graphs to confirm a piece of information. For years, the adoption rate for BI tools has been around 20-30% on average, even with all the advancements in the industry.
Data has the power to tell stories and provide answers; the trick lies in asking the right questions. We frequently criticize analytics software for being overly complex. However, a simple, intuitive search can significantly change the perception of these seemingly complex BI tools.
Let's refer to the multinational clothing franchise example. If the management wants to know all the vendor contracts that expire next month, they must study databases for hours together.
With the search bar, they must type "contracts by vendors expiring in the next month." Then, the search-based business analytics platform would display the final number to show the contracts expiring in the next month.
Why is the Search Bar in Business Analytics Important?
While it's humanly impossible to dive deep into various data sets beyond a point, artificial intelligence has no such limitations. AI can examine data in great detail, extract granular information & provide precise insights.
That's where the search option and other data analytics platforms come into play. They allow the user to ask questions that would otherwise take significant time to answer.
Also, Read | Understand the benefits of using business intelligence for your business here.
What are the benefits of Search-Driven Analytics?
The BI tool's search bar helps tomorrow's business users quickly gain actionable insights from their data. It helps them make decisions quickly and accurately while integrating data from multiple sources.
Following are a few of the benefits of using search for businesses of tomorrow:
- Accessibility
The user-friendly nature of the search option makes it accessible to any business, regardless of its size and industry. Moreover, one can use this tool productively without any technical training. Such is the ease of use of the search bar.
- Automation
Insight generation requires data to be read, integrated, analyzed, and presented in a consumable format. Modern BI and analytics platforms with search bars have completely automated this process, making it quick and easy. It reduces the business user's job of typing a question in the search bar and instantly getting an answer.
- Accuracy
Implementing an automated process using machine learning tools makes the system very accurate. The entire process, guided by artificial intelligence, leaves no room for human error.
- Speed
This process would have taken days together several years ago, but now it takes a few seconds to complete. The search bar processes data at an unparalleled rate, allowing the user to gain insights and make data-driven decisions.
- Guidance
Before the search, the onus of generating insights was solely on the data and business analyst of the organization. With guided search (as provided by INSIA), business owners are guided through the entire insight discovery journey.
Who is it for?
The simplicity of the search option is its most appealing feature. The platform aims to democratize data analytics by empowering everyone to use insights to accelerate decision-making.
Whether you are the CEO of an MNC, head of a business analyst team, or a local grocery store manager, as long as your business generates data, the search option will help you analyze the same.
INSIA, an augmented analytics and business intelligence platform, provides end-to-end automation from data to insights. The user can search for any information they need, accessing it instantly. In addition, the platform is designed so that the higher the volume of data analyzed by the user, the better the quality of insights generated for the business.
While a data-driven strategy can benefit any business, the ROI from implementing one depends on its accuracy. The more accurate your data, the better you will decide and drive results.
This is what the search bar does. Its pace and accuracy create a business environment that provides actionable insights within seconds of a single search, making it an essential tool for business analysis. Adopting a data-driven culture helps companies move closer to their goals while understanding the role of data for consistent growth.
INSIA is changing the way businesses use search engines to find information. With its powerful AI, INSIA can help you speed up your searches and extract more relevant insights from your data. If you've ever wished that data analytics was as simple as a Google search, INSIA is for you. With its powerful search abilities and Google-like search bar, INSIA ensures you find the correct information quickly and efficiently. You can start using INSIA today by clicking here for a free trial!
Final Thoughts
The emergence of search-based analytics has simplified insight generation, making data readily available to us. Legacy dashboards take a lot of time to build & get outdated fast. They look at data backward and answer questions only you can think of, making them unfit for testing new hypotheses or running experiments.
Implementing search-powered analytics helps companies achieve true data literacy, giving every decision-maker the necessary tools for business intelligence. There is no doubt, then, that in a few years, the search-based modern BI platforms will become to data analytics what the internet and Google are to citizens today.
