Data without a decision is a distraction

Dashboards with all the bells and whistles might look pretty, but without any context, they don't add any value. Modern analytics platforms today must take a natural language “question-and-answer” approach to solve core and strategic challenges in the business.

The ability to ask your data a question in simple language saves time, money, and lends context to the subsequent visualizations and analytics.

One of our favorite sayings around Briq is “data without a decision is a distraction.” Too many leaders and their teams spent time hunting and gathering information, and by the time they are able to collate everything together, the information is either outdated or heavily error-prone.

Business leaders in today’s construction company should not be spending time trying to track information down. Instead, they should be asking their vast data questions and giving context to it. 

Everything else is a distraction.

‍Deliver results in a data-driven company

Colorful, eye-catching dashboards look pretty, but if the underlying data in these visualizations aren’t answering core questions in the business, it’s likely all the time and effort spent in creating them has been wasted.

To combat this trap, Briq created technology to connect natural language with structured and unstructured data. Rather than starting with the data and visualization, Briq starts with the question and connects it to the data needed to answer it. 

Here are some typical search examples that Briq can answer:

• Who is my most profitable client?
• How much labor will I need to execute the projects I have in the backlog?
• Where should I be allocating my excess cash? Which markets should I be expanding into?
• How can I enhance my fees?
• Where am I losing money on change orders?

Briq can make sense of massive amounts of data and hunt down valuable public data as well. At an organization level, it can also add clarity and uniformity to data from multiple, unrelated sources.

‍Read at lighting speed

Using natural language in analytics is a massively important piece of the modern data strategy, but it doesn’t stop with just querying your data. Other natural language techniques can also read PDFs, such as a contract or a change order, and derive meaning and context from it.

This underlying technology is based on the same technology that drives Google searches, Alexa, Siri, Autocomplete, and countless other functions and tools we access every day.

Briq can “read” documents at lightning speed and draws on contextual patterns to make personalized suggestions, complete requests, retrieve data, and a growing list of additional query-based activities.

It is designed to summarize large blocks of text by identifying key concepts and phrases, commonalities and anomalies, from multiple data sources and rendering this information into an understandable format, so you can identify risk, predict costs, and avoid losing money. 

Using Briq is like employing a whole team of incredibly intelligent, speed-reading data analysts, without the overhead.

Need to compare contracts against your standard contract to detect phrases that may indicate risk? Need to read RFIs to know which ones have a risk of turning into a change order? Natural language is a massively diverse and under-utilized tool in most construction companies today.

Any platform you use for analysis should give your words meaning to give your data context. Briq is a financial automation platform that does all that and more. We connect to all your data sources allowing you to streamline processes and automate a lot of manual labor. Maybe it’s time you ask Briq a question—talk to our experts first: br.iq.com/demo.