Collaboration is a key driver of success in business and one of the hardest things to achieve in today’s work climate. Businesses are juggling remote workers, hybrid workers, and everything in between since the pandemic’s onset. Business intelligence can be crucial in creating collaboration.

According to the U.S. Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics, remote working between 2005 and 2017 went up by 159%; however, despite this, FlexJobs noted that only 3.4% of the workforce worked from home. Of course, this was all before COVID-19 hit businesses hard, forcing most non-essential workers to work remotely. And perhaps to everyone’s advantage, this trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere too fast. A recent survey demonstrated that 82% of respondents enjoy working from home, and 66% felt they were more productive working remotely. It seems that the future of work has changed dramatically this year, forcing businesses to put various solutions in place to support the changes that COVID-19 brought about.

According to Zapier CEO Wade Foster, who has hundreds of employees working remotely,  “companies who don’t have effective systems in place are winging it in a lot of areas right now. They’re going to have a hard time with this sudden transition. They are being thrust into an environment where they have no structure.” He told Computerworld that the “wrong type of management, misaligned culture, and lack of essential tools” could create a negative remote working environment.

Business intelligence can be the catalyst

One of the “essential tools” to create a successful, collaborative work environment is having an automated centralized Business Intelligence platform, cloud-based, that is utilized across the organization’s BI landscape. Today, businesses are dependent on data to make important decisions. Gone are the days where only business analysts were accessing data; today, the entire organization or anyone who needs to make a decision – whether big or small – needs to have access to the same data to collaborate with team members immediately. The data exists in silos and needs one centralized solution that will allow visibility to the entire landscape. A cloud-based, centralized Business Intelligence platform provides the internal framework where everyone has access to the same semantically defined, usable and trustworthy data right off the bat.

This has been particularly useful when collaboration is required to solve a business problem for a large organization. So much time was wasted in the past, and projects were stalled by the “black hole” of manually discovering, organizing, preparing, and cleaning data for analysis. Sometimes this manual work would take months. The automation of metadata lets people get on with collaboration by accessing the same data across the entire company. A person working in California will have the same data that a remote worker in Australia will have, and if they are on the same team, they are looking at the same information and able to collaborate on how to proceed to the next step.

It is now more crucial than ever to have a centralized, automated business intelligence platform. As workers become more scattered across the world, data is becoming more centralized, creating a collaborative environment within the remote workspace. The ability to trace the origin of metadata with a view of the entire data lineage, and with data discovery trace data immediately, will significantly impact the speed in how decisions can be made by providing the relevant information to make such decisions immediately, creating the internal framework of a collaborative workforce.

Who knew that COVID-19 would change the way businesses operate forever – making us more remote yet cohesive and collaborative since the nuts and bolts of the company are being forced to centralize? Companies worldwide are unifying through centralized data; having the right information, no matter where you are.