Today, the biggest challenge for any organisation is to rapidly parse through enormous amounts of data and drive out the information that will deliver key insights and make more informed business decisions. Business intelligence is one such game-changer process that can help businesses use their data to their advantage by presenting the otherwise unusable pile of data into an understandable and interpretable form.

Lumenore, a Netlink platform, has been helping organisations to simplify the data and make business intelligence more actionable. A leader in the augmented BI platform market, Lumenore is designed to assist businesses to turn their data repository into actionable organisational intelligence that anyone across the organisation can leverage. The platform provides a no-code business intelligence platform that is focused on performance management. The power of conversational intelligence and predictive analytics bridges the gap between the available data and enables insight-informed decision-making. Lumenore platform helps organisations create an all-in-one data universe that turns raw data into an organisational business intelligence repository.

Naren Vijay, the Executive Vice President of Lumenore, is responsible for driving revenue growth and customer acquisition at the company. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering (Mechanical) degree from Ranipettai Engineering College, Vellore and co-founded Enterprise Touch, a bootstrapped services company in mobile application development. Working in the organisation, he quickly realised his potential in the low code space and created a Centre of Excellence with an expertise-rich and futuristic outlook.

Analytics India Magazine got in touch with Naren to discuss the intricacies of business intelligence and understand how it makes a difference in many organisations.

AIM – Define business intelligence in your own words and explain how BI makes a difference in the company.

Naren – Business intelligence (BI) is a technology-enabled method of analysing raw data and drawing insights. It combines business analytics and consolidated and engineered data to help organisations make more data-driven decisions. Every company has vast data, and BI can help unlock its value by making valuable inferences. The organisation’s full data can be housed in a data warehouse or smaller data marts. BI tools can help organise data, prepare it for analysis, perform queries, and provide data visualisations and business insights, whether the data is real-time or historical. One of the most significant benefits of BI is that it allows businesses to determine what their customers want and how best to meet their needs. It is a tool for boosting team productivity and accelerating corporate growth.

AIM – How augmented BI platform can help organisations go beyond reporting, querying and diagnostic analytics?

Naren – Artificial intelligence (AI) and business intelligence are combined in augmented analytics. Traditionally, organisations had to rely on data scientists to analyse isolated datasets and draw inferences using basic charts to make sense of any data. Businesses can use augmented BI, powered by AI and Machine Learning, to automate data preparation for analysis by labelling and structuring data. This method makes data management easier and allows users to draw appropriate conclusions. It enables businesses to analyse their options by combining decision intelligence, tracking the outcome and changing their approach to achieve positive outcomes.

AI also helps analytics by making the process of finding new insights easier. Without a specific user question, it can show notable trends and insights. Lumenore’s anti-dashboard ideology prioritises the development of intelligence over dashboards. By combining advanced analytics, Google-like querying, and AI-powered suggestions, we hope to help organisations make better decisions. As a result, data complexity is reduced, and organisations have quick and easy access to the insight they need to make key business choices.

AIM – How does business intelligence help in organisation decision making? Could you cite an example of a company that Lumenore worked with helping them with BI and elaborate on how it made a difference? 

Naren – Earlier, organisations dealing with data would focus on collecting and maintaining various spreadsheets and dashboards. However, with time, they have realised that this is not adequate. Moreover, the amount of data that the organisations have has grown exponentially in the last few years.

Business intelligence helps companies make informed decisions on strategic issues by providing crucial information on the current and historical performance of the company along with future trends, expected demands, customer behaviour and a few other factors.

Our client, one of the largest broadcasting companies based out of the United States, managed over 12,000 contact centre employees. They were hired to support their customer support and sales department. However, as these vendors started using unfair practices to retain the customers, the client relayed support from Lumenore’s Agent Outlier Management Solution to bring transparency and enforce accountability into their agents’ actions. By providing services like data integration, voice-driven instant insights and providing hidden insights using advanced data discovery, our BI platform was able to correct the agent behaviour. This, in turn, helped reduce inappropriate cross-sell/up-sell, call hang-up scenarios and call transfer rate.

AIM – How can companies bridge the distance between data and decision making?

​Naren – Organisations should invest in a good BI platform to successfully bridge the gap between data and decision-making. An organisation’s current and short-term goals should be considered while selecting a platform. The tool should be affordable, easy to use, and available to all users. It should deliver real-time insights and take into consideration all of the data.

AIM – What is the importance of conversational analytics and the emerging trends around conversational and predictive analytics?

​Naren – Conversational analytics assist firms to navigate through data, extract the right information, and derive context from it in the context of business intelligence. Any user in the organisation may acquire real-time information in a flash with the aid of conversational analytics. It not only saves time but also increases productivity.

Users may go beyond the fundamental conclusions with the help of a good BI platform and conversational analytics. They can get more thorough explanatory insights and create relevant visualisations. In other words, without having to code, one can acquire customised, actionable information in seconds. It not only assists in the retrieval of relevant data but also makes smart recommendations.

The practical effect of business intelligence and big data is predictive analytics. Many organisations are already using predictive analytics to apply ML & AI algorithms for data mining and future forecasting trends.

AIM – What is Lumenore’s suite of applications, and how is it helping organisations make sense of all the data they have at their disposal?

​Naren – Lumenore is a powerful, intuitive, cloud-based BI and analytics platform that delivers organisational intelligence by sifting data from any business application. Our aim is to simplify decision-making and democratise data across the organisation.

We offer seamless data management by creating Data Universe, which can then be structured to deliver actionable insights. Furthermore, our no-code facilitates interactive visualisations and conversational querying. This, in turn, streamlines decision-making.

At Lumenore’s, our most popular innovations are “Ask Me” and “Do You Know” modules, as they provide instant analytics. These tools are easy to use and provide instant answers to the query. Another advantage of these tools is that one does not have to be data literate to drive meaningful information via those. Since these features are an outcome of augmented analytics, they can even provide a complete list of probable actions and suggest the best course to achieve the organisational target.

AIM – What is the current scenario for big data & analytics, and what are the key trends driving the growth in this segment?

​Naren – We live in a data-driven era. Data comes in from a variety of places in any organisation. According to industry estimates, the global data sphere will contain 175 zettabytes of data by 2025. The biggest difficulty organisations face right now is coping with this massive amount of data that is expanding by the second. They are always seeking new solutions to bridge the gap between data and analytics that are both productive and cost-effective. Organisations may use business intelligence technologies to unlock the power of this data and make quick, data-driven decisions.

Data solutions are projected to be in the driver’s seat for the next few years. As a result, businesses will continue to invest in a system that allows them to stay ahead of the curve while objectively reviewing their decisions.

Trends such as augmented analytics that provide automated data discovery using machine learning/statistical approaches, narrative insights that provide self-explanatory natural language, and the ease of use of analytics platforms are projected to boost the industry’s growth.

AIM – What are the key business intelligence trends in 2022?

Naren – Data is available for users using the correct business intelligence tools. They reduce computing time by breaking down the necessary skills. Previously, companies had to rely on specialists to do data mining operations. However, executives of any level can use these technologies to do analytical duties such as reviewing data sets or executing data-mining tasks.

Organisations also recognise the necessity of performing analytics on the entire data set rather than just a subset of it. As a result, businesses have begun to use the data universe, which includes data management designs such as data engineering, data lakes, and data security.

Data storytelling and visualisation are becoming increasingly popular among businesses because they bring data into context. These are easier to understand because they use interactive reports and explanatory images to create a story around key data. Rather than simple graphs or a block of text, this information is easier to absorb and enables speedier decision-making.

Today’s businesses recognise the importance of data and want to do more than merely collect and mine it. They invest in technologies that help them improve their analytics, performance, and other crucial indicators by utilising high-quality data.