In today’s fast-paced and competitive business landscape, companies are striving to gain a competitive advantage by harnessing the power of data. A successful Business Intelligence (BI) strategy can help companies make informed decisions, improve efficiency, and enhance their bottom line. In this article, we will explore the key elements that are essential for a successful Business Intelligence strategy.
Business intelligence plays an important role in helping organisations improve their decision-making. The right business intelligence strategy ensures your businesses is able to identify data problems swiftly and accurately; without one, it’s a strenuous task to bring meaning to your data, and make any sense of what can be considered an actionable insight. The data that your company gathers remains just that: data.
Your business intelligence strategy puts this data to use, helping you to gather it more comprehensively, translate it more accurately, and to use it to make more robust decisions. When executed correctly, it lays out a clear roadmap of what you’re aiming to achieve with your business intelligence practices.
Assess your current architecture
Your businesses may have business intelligence technologies in place, but are they performing the right roles?
Assessing your current architecture helps to determine where your business intelligence strategy is currently heading. You can use this as a baseline, to identify the issues your businesses currently faces, map out the tools you’re already using, and pinpoint the gaps where your business intelligence practices need to be improved.
Setting Clear Goals and Objectives
To create a successful BI strategy, the first and most critical step is to set clear goals and objectives. We will discuss the importance of defining specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals for BI strategies. We will also provide examples of goals and objectives that companies can set.
Data Quality
The quality of data is crucial for the success of any BI strategy. We will discuss the importance of having clean, accurate, and up-to-date data. We will also provide tips on how to improve data quality and avoid common data quality issues.
Set a clear scope for your strategy
Once you’ve identified the gaps in your business intelligence strategy, you’ll know what to fix.
After all, planning for the future doesn’t work if it’s vague.
According to Accenture, 81% of businesses don’t have a robust data strategy to leverage the full potential of their data. By working out where to improve your business intelligence strategy, and creating scope to achieve this, you’ll already be head and shoulders above your competition.
Knowing what you want to achieve, both from a strategic point of view and also what you want to get out of a new business intelligence platform, can help to create clear guideposts and goals to work towards. Therefore, it’s important to set a clear scope for the strategy and create an achievable roadmap to guide it.
Data Governance
Data governance refers to the management of data-related policies, procedures, and standards within an organization. We will explain the importance of having a data governance framework in place to ensure data accuracy, consistency, and compliance. We will also provide tips on how to develop and implement a data governance strategy.
Technology Infrastructure
A robust and scalable technology infrastructure is necessary to support a BI strategy. We will discuss the importance of having a reliable and secure data storage, processing, and visualization infrastructure. We will also provide examples of BI tools and platforms that companies can use to achieve their BI objectives.
Identify the right stakeholders
This element works on multiple levels. It’s crucial to identify the right talent and teams within the business who can help deploy your strategy, but it’s also important to think about the end-users.
To do this, it’s beneficial to gain a clear idea of who needs to see your data, who will be using it, and how they will ultimately use it. Much like planning your overall goals, you’re planning for what you want your business users to achieve.
Create clear data governance with thorough data infrastructure
Your business intelligence strategy relies on a robust businesses intelligence platform. But this platform needs reliable data sources to feed into it.
Having clear governance over your data is crucial to a business intelligence strategy. Governance at every step ensures that you’re always getting the right information, when and where you need it, in the most useful format.
Thorough data infrastructure ensures you’re able to access the data you need from the right sources and guarantees these sources can be trusted.
Data Analytics
Data analytics is the process of analyzing data to extract insights and make informed decisions. We will discuss the importance of having a data analytics framework in place, including data exploration, data mining, and predictive analytics. We will also provide tips on how to implement data analytics tools and techniques effectively.
Data Visualization
Data visualization refers to the presentation of data in a graphical or visual format. We will explain the importance of data visualization in BI strategies, including its ability to simplify complex data and make it more accessible to decision-makers. We will also provide examples of data visualization tools and techniques.
Set a realistic timeframe
There’s no set timeframe in which to create a successful business intelligence strategy, it just has to be achievable for your busines.
In some circumstances, a new business intelligence dashboard can be created in a matter of days. Sweeping busines-wide change, on the other hand, takes time, so setting a strategy to execute and close out within a matter of months may be unrealistic.
Business intelligence maturity takes years; it takes time to build and source datasets, to truly understand how your busines uses its data, and to leverage the full capabilities of your busines technologies or platforms.
The timeframe for your busines strategy depends on what you’re aiming to achieve.
User Adoption
For a BI strategy to be successful, it must be widely adopted by users across the organization. We will discuss the importance of user adoption and how to achieve it. We will provide tips on how to develop user-friendly BI applications, provide adequate training and support, and promote a data-driven culture.
Continuous Improvement
Finally, we will discuss the importance of continuous improvement in BI strategies. We will explain the need to regularly review and update BI goals, objectives, and metrics. We will also provide tips on how to measure the success of a BI strategy and make continuous improvements.