There’s a question I find myself asking more and more in conversations with product owners, finance leads, and SaaS founders:
Is your BI strategy genuinely built for the world you're operating in now? Or is it still serving the one you were in five years ago?
It’s easy to assume that because you’re generating reports or have a dashboard in place, you’ve ticked the “data-driven” box. But the truth is, most organisations are running a modern business on yesterday’s data. The cadence of decision-making has changed, yet many BI strategies haven’t kept pace.
We’ve entered a real-time world—and most legacy BI setups weren’t designed for that.
The Pace Has Shifted. Has Your Strategy?
Business doesn’t wait for the end of month report anymore. Your customers don’t. Your board certainly doesn’t. And your competitors? They’re using live data to make same-day decisions, test assumptions in real time, and adjust course before problems escalate.
According to IDC, the global volume of data is expected to reach 181 zettabytes by 2025—nearly double the data generated in 2023.¹ But what’s more concerning is that Forrester reports that between 60–73% of all data goes unused for analytics.² It’s not just about more data. It’s about acting on the right data, at the right time.
Meanwhile, Gartner forecasts that over 70% of new business applications will include embedded analytics by 2026, and that by 2025, more than 80% of organisations will shift to data-driven operations powered by real-time insight.³
These shifts aren’t just technological, they’re strategic. They’re redefining how businesses operate.
Real-Time Isn’t a Feature. It’s a Foundation.
Here’s what I tell our clients: real-time insight isn’t just faster data. It’s a different mindset. It changes how people behave. When teams can see what’s happening now, they stop making assumptions. They start experimenting. They trust the data. And they act with far greater confidence.
And let’s be honest, confidence is in short supply when you’re relying on last week’s numbers, manually cobbled together from five different systems, with three different “truths” floating around.
That’s not data driven. That’s data dependent, and there’s a difference.
Are You Still Asking BI to Do What It’s Always Done?
If your BI function exists solely to document performance, it’s time to ask more of it. At Panintelligence, we help organisations turn their BI strategy from a reporting layer into a decision making engine, something that surfaces insight in real time, embedded where people work, and accessible without a team of analysts standing by.
That could mean:
- Product teams giving customers real time usage data in-platform
- Ops teams getting live alerts when KPIs move out of range
- Executives seeing predictive trends rather than retrospective summaries
- Frontline teams self-serving the answers they need to act without waiting
It’s not just us seeing this shift. McKinsey found that organisations making intensive use of customer analytics are 23 times more likely to outperform competitors in new customer acquisition, and 19 times more likely to achieve above-average profitability.⁴
This isn’t theoretical, it’s the operational advantage of real-time insight, in action.
What I See in the Field
In conversations with SaaS vendors, multi-site retailers, and even large financial services providers, there’s often a moment of realisation. They’ve invested in cloud platforms, AI tooling, and agile ways of working but their data strategy is stuck in a batch-based world.
BI hasn’t failed them. It just hasn’t evolved. And when insight lags behind action, your competitive edge starts to dull.
We don’t have to overhaul everything to fix this. Sometimes it’s about unlocking the value of data you already have, in the tools your people already use just faster, smarter, and embedded.
The Bottom Line
If you're relying on a BI strategy built for a slower world, it's time to re-evaluate. Ask yourself: are we enabling faster, more confident decisions across the business? Or are we documenting what’s already happened?
Because the difference between those two approaches is more than just timing. It’s the difference between reacting - and leading.
Let’s talk about where your data strategy is today, and where it needs to be tomorrow.
References
- IDC, Global DataSphere Forecast 2023–2027, published April 2023
- Forrester, Data Literacy Is the Key to Data Governance and Data Intelligence Success, May 2023
- Gartner, Top Trends in Data and Analytics for 2024
- McKinsey, The Age of Analytics: Competing in a Data-Driven World, 2021
