Embedded business intelligence is the integration of business intelligence solutions within business process software. Embedded BI provides software with capabilities such as data visualization, analytics, dashboards, and reporting. Instead of using a standalone application, embedded BI enables business intelligence directly within an organization's applications.

Embedded BI also leverages the data context from the business applications to provide relevant information to the users as they work in familiar environments. Placing BI capabilities into a single application results in greater productivity and a higher rate of user adoption than using multiple applications at the same time.

The traditional BI approach depends on BI and IT teams to aggregate, analyze, and visualize the business data and provide the needed KPIs, charts, and other visualizations to help business decisions. Since this process involves multiple teams, it takes longer to produce an output that the business users can use for strategic and tactical decisions.

Traditional BI benefits from the in-depth analytics available to specialist teams. Embedded BI makes advanced analytics more accessible by integrating real-time reports and interactive dashboards directly into applications that users use every day.

Self-service BI tools allow users to analyze business data and present the results of that analysis without waiting for the organization's IT staff members. It helps optimize decision-making capabilities across that organization by reducing the time to get to the analysis.

Embedded BI integrates self-service BI tools into business applications to enhance user experience with techniques such as ad-hoc reporting, interactive dashboards, and data visualization.

Embedded BI, along with self-service BI capabilities, allows users to customize their business applications further to suit their unique needs and drive tactical and strategic decisions for growth.

There are many benefits to embedding BI. Integrating BI into existing applications allows organizations to integrate data analytics, visualization, and insights within their applications more effectively. BI in general also improves insights and metric reporting as it can work with multiple data sources.

With the KPIs and other actionable insights available directly in the business applications, managers can make quicker and better strategic decisions.

Typically, businesses use customer relationship management (CRM) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions to make decisions without relying on outside specialists.

The use of embedded BI is permanently changing how they make these decisions by eliminating the need to leave their current systems. Incorporating BI into existing applications allows users to make more accurate decisions to achieve the desired outcome. It also improves the users' engagement in the system, which increases the value of these applications to the organization.

Embedded BI can significantly enhance an organization's business performance by integrating operations with analytics. This capability allows application users to analyze data and take immediate action on their results. Furthermore, embedded BI facilitates the improvement of business operations by enabling real-time analysis-based KPIs.

For example, a manufacturing organization could use analytics to monitor and prevent maintenance problems by identifying patterns in equipment breakdown.

Placing BI into applications allows users to make better decisions by combining insights into data with corrective action. It enables applications to leverage analytics as part of their standard workflow, rather than a separate process. Assume for this example that a POS has embedded analytics for making recommendations to customers. These analytics can run in the background and provide customers with coupons or suggest other products based on what they've already purchased.

Today's organizations are increasingly likely to capitalize on the trend towards integrating BI into their existing software. The journey towards this goal often begins by making the decision to build BI in-house or buying a third-party solution.

It may be surprising to learn that an organization with software development as a core competency is more likely to obtain embedded BI from a third party than an organization that doesn't develop software.

Independent software vendors (ISVs) specialize in developing software like CRM, ERP, and financial applications. However, these organizations recognize that BI analytics is typically outside their expertise. ISVs are, therefore, more likely than general enterprises to buy embedded analytics functionality from a third party.

Typical enterprises that don't develop commercial software products are more likely to build this functionality themselves. They have proprietary business applications that IT teams have already developed, including those intended for consumption by outside parties such as customers and suppliers. These organizations are often eager to immediately begin an in-house build of analytics functionality upon deciding they need embedded BI.

However, general enterprises should first consider the embedded analytics that is commercially available, like ISVs do. Third-party vendors are more likely to be experts in the latest BI technologies and trends, including predictive analytics, machine learning, and interactive visualization.

Furthermore, buying embedded BI allows organizations to focus on their core competencies, allowing them to leverage the toolset to bring the BI capabilities to the users more quickly.