Technology is not just a mere word for us now. It has surrounded the day-to-day lives of every human being, no matter what work he is involved in. We live and breathe technology in today’s time. According to a study, the worldwide spending on technology has reached $3.4 billion and it is increasing at a rapid pace. This data is based on every household and enterprise spending money on new gadgets and tech products.

Businesses have been highly benefited from technology over the years. The most recent advancement being Artificial Intelligence which deals with every sector like automobile, healthcare, logistics, finance, retail and whatnot. Today, every enterprise, be it a large or an SME is largely dependent on the technological aspects to bring more revenue for the growth of the organization.

Below I have listed some of the most common ways how technology has transformed businesses and their growth.

1. Rise of Automation: The use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning has paved the way for businesses to automate the whole work process and drastically reducing the time and effort of their workforce and wield them in other productive tasks. But by no means it is meant that AI has replaced human workers. However, professionals need to understand its roles and responsibilities in their organizations and quickly adapt to it. 
2. Use of Mobile Application: Mobile applications or commonly abbreviated as Apps has been an added advantage for businesses to expand their reach and presence in front of their customers.  Every company wants to showcase its services and products on mobile devices and the best way to do it is by listing in the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. The convenience of the internet in pocket-friendly devices has helped users to download and use these apps very easily.
3. Cloud Storage: There has always been a comparison between physical storage and cloud storage. Although both of them have their own pros and cons, but due to the ease of accessibility, Cloud Storage has always garnered more attention with services like OneDrive, Dropbox, Google Drive, AWS and Azure playing a vital role in bringing cloud storage closer to its audience; be it an individual or any business.
4. Digital Marketing: Today’s era is completely based on digitization and when it comes to the marketing of products or services, every business wants to have a workforce with good Digital Marketing skills who can bring potential leads and work towards the growth of the organization. In a broader sense, a Marketing professional should have the skills and knowledge to present the company’s offerings via Digital platforms like Social Media, Email Marketing, Ad Campaigns, SEO, SMM and others.

The above highlighting points are just a few of the numerous tactics on how Technology is helping today’s businesses grow. But, one thing is for sure, without the use of Information Technology, no business, whether small or large, can survive in this fast-paced world and only via technology, they can cater the need for real-time problem-solving solutions.

Corporate business strategy and technology roadmap are very much crucial.
A business intelligence strategy is designed to give you the information you need and in a way that’s actionable on many levels. To be data-driven, you’ll need to access, view and collaborate with your data from anywhere. To ensure that your business intelligence strategy is successful you need to consider what data is important to analyze to what metrics are meaningful to your teams. Businesses utilize data mining and statistics to prepare their business intelligence strategies in a comprehensive manner.
Why do I need one?
Applying business intelligence is important — but the way you do it matters just as much. This is why having a BI strategy is extremely important: ‘no pilot ever flew their plane in the air without a map or direction’.
Day to day business information is increasing and with the amount of data dealt and stored gets way out of proportion to treat it manually. On top all of the unstructured data which needs to be processed first in order to be understood and later used. It takes time and knowledge to make the best out of such asset, as well as a solid plan. A strategy will give your solution a direction, and a goal. Business intelligence without strategy might bring up some insights whilst it will not lead you where you want to head to.
Experts say: “ The project where BI strategy was involved were more successful than project without strategy”

.Design a Company-wide business intelligence strategy
Because BI has the potential to bring decision-making to every layer of the organization. A business intelligence strategy should be created to include all relevant departments and business areas. These should include finance, executive, IT, purchasing, logistics and marketing.

Build the strategy slowly
Think big, but take little steps towards your goal. At this stage, you will need to plan your business goal and most importantly, align it to a specific business requirement. The more focused you are in planning your business goals, the better you’re going to achieve.
You may follow the iterative process so as to build the knowledge of the team. The teammates may analyze data related to sales information, customer information, ROI from the designated source like (ERP, CRM,) or any marketing automation tools that stores customer information. Though as the last step you need to determine the KPIs that are useful and aligns to your objective.

Attain a whole of business view
Any business probably tracks and collects a huge amount of information. At times it seems as simple as what product is in store, and how long it takes it to get into a store and how long it takes to empty the store, can feel overwhelming. While handling all of it can seem like a headache, the right business intelligence strategy can turn the information into data that drives decisions.
In order to attain the bigger picture, you must bring data sets from various departments such as supply chain, sales, and product lines. Then, the information can be used to generate greater revenue. Thus, the BI strategy brings success to the business.

Mechanism for a quick access to your data
When you have an idea whilst you got to make a quick decision. You will need the access to information fast. Now, as you move forward to extract data from a spreadsheet or build data from scratch, the process literally slows you down. That is where dashboards and data visualizations come in.
To get a glance of the actionable data whilst turn the information into decision making. Here comes the role of a right dashboard in BI strategy. For example, you can put the individual employees and salaries on the dashboard. Then, you can compare them.
With a dashboard, the information you want is already in front of you. Your energy and attention is focused on the analysis. This is how BI strategy brings smooth functionality to your business.

Work with real time data
This is to elaborate how real time data can oversee the hurdles of a business owner/retailer or whole-seller through BI strategy.
The primary motive of Supermarket retailer Simplistic and their BI strategy is to provide good visibility of performance throughout the day to the team leader’s and their team member’s. This is carried out on user friendly KPI dashboards. KPI’s can be set accordingly to measure different aspects.
For an instance- The Management is eager for stores to be able see an update every 15–20 minutes on the volume of sales they had completed, the average value per transaction, how many items are in the sale whilst it included a cross-selling item such as Coke with french fries or Up-sell of Coconul hair oil with Shampoo.
Hence the BI strategy bestows the team members and team leaders complete ownership of their overall performance. This helps the team members understand their individual and team results whilst creates an active competition between teams. Thus which results in better performance and higher sales.

Collaboration
With BoldTek’s BI strategy solution collaborative capabilities, your work will have the benefit of your entire team’s input. BI strategies allow users to have the benefit of the input of the entire team. Collaborative business intelligence takes you on-board on the same page as your colleagues get. It also allows you to comment and question your colleagues. BI strategy helps you in carrying out the effective teamwork.

How BoldTek can leverage your Business intelligence strategy?
Strategic and collaborative engagements to help identify business opportunities and potentials to deliver specific outcomes.
Orchestrated sessions, discovery workshops to model solution roadmap that effectively leverages best practices and experiences from our global strategic business engagements. We eliminate the unpredictability that lies in the execution of any long-term business and IT solution roadmap. The effective management of the alignments of corporate business strategy and technology roadmap is very much crucial.
Website: www.boldtek.com