A business intelligence strategy enables your company to make better decisions and uplift business growth. Here are the main steps you should follow in order to succeed.
Business Intelligence (BI) is the collection of technologies, applications, and operations to collect, integrate, analyze, and present business information for better decision-making. In short words, BI is a set of instructions that empowers businesses to evaluate their performance, predict future challenges and listen to customer needs. Moreover, BI is essential to uplift business growth and conserves competitive benefits.
To be well aware of customer behavior, companies need to acknowledge the usefulness of their customer’s information. Therefore, they can change their strategy to gain new perspectives. Information gathered from customers can work as a catalyst for product development or enhancement to fulfill customer wants.
The best business intelligence strategy aligns with business goals and allows data transformation in your company. It enhances employees’ trust, and they can make decisions and design future policies in no time. To achieve that, what can we do to make the best business intelligence strategy? Let’s define the main steps!
Defining BI scope
Before deploying business intelligence software, you need to know what BI means to your company. BI mainly uses data to drive business decisions, but you need to know how it will operate in your specific case. For example, HelloFresh creates automated reports for campaigns while Chipotle uses software to evaluate sales performance. Every company uses business intelligence strategies in different ways, and you have to discover what your business demands from BI.
1. Scope analyzation
After completing the operational aim, you have to decide which department of the company to incorporate first. Do you want to use BI to predict financial performance or inventory changes? It is essential to analyze scope before moving toward the nest phase.
2. Prioritizing reports
Now, you need to pick what to measure from available data and explore the prior reports for your company. Reports should contain KPIs aligning with company goals.
3. Competitive analysis
BI tools allow you to monitor competitor growth, market trends, and customer behavior. You can analyze competitors through their blogs, articles, videos, case studies. Never forget to include competitive analysis while developing a business intelligence strategy.
Having these three elements in mind, you will know the project size and identify available in-house resources to implement your BI strategy.
Don’t miss this infographic: How to create an IT strategy that makes your business grow
Stakeholders involvement
Although business intelligence includes software, it also relies on manpower. Where BI needs financial data, it also requires the involvement of other company departments. You should bring representatives from each team under the influence of your BI strategy. Ask them about their concerns on the new plan and how they will use data in their operations.
Round-Up your BI team
Your BI team is the main pillar to implement your business intelligence strategy. BI platforms only present reports and dashboards that are reachable to non-analysts, but you need a cross-function team to run and implement your plan. There are some roles with associated responsibilities that you should have in your team:
- Analytics manager to the monitor software platform
- Enterprise-level software developer to integrate BI platform to existing software
- Networking manager to maintain the software network
- BI analyst to train staff members
- QA analysts to determine the risks associated with BI project due to lack of controls or external forces
- Admin to control, organize content, and authorize permissions
- A data entry expert to enter data in documents to use the BI platform effectively
Alongside these people, you need a committee and executive member to ensure project performance and detect weaknesses.
Take a look at this: Do you need Data Scientists for your team? You already have them!
Choosing BI platform
Identifying a BI platform can do a lot for you; that’s why you need to evaluate the best fit for your plan. Many platforms offer the same functionalities, but you need to rank a platform with the following features:
- Easy to interact with data in a visual interface
- Increases data accessibility and visual presentation
- Allow diving deeper into data to discover new insights Allows us to dive deeper into data to discover new sights
- Facilitate new data discoveries
- Easy to collaborate for data analysis and sharing
Data infrastructure
Data sources play a critical role in a business intelligence plan for accurate analysis. Traditional BI platform imports data from the warehouse, but modern BI platform can analyze data stored on multiple sources.
How Cloud Business Intelligence can help you
The convergence of Cloud computing and Business Intelligence can be the best available solution to make the best business intelligence strategy. Where BI delivers accurate information to the right individuals, the cloud offers agility to access BI apps. The elegance of cloud business intelligence applications is about their accessibility on a variety of devices. It has removed traditional barriers where you can only access applications onsite.
Here are few benefits you can enjoy using Cloud BI:
- Easier to set up and operate
- Low IT involvements and costs
- No additional hardware required
- Faster Deployment
- Easy to accommodate a large number of users
The potential of Cloud Business intelligence is staggering same as cloud computing. Business owners are moving toward the cloud as it is easy to use and speeds up processes. It also offers in-depth features to create innovative reports.
Cloud BI has the power to become a center of attention of enterprises for the development of business intelligence strategies. It will also offer self-services BI providing real times access to critical business data.
Take a look at this: Benefits of Cloud Computing: a quick guide about the Cloud
Develop BI roadmap
BI team is responsible for developing a road map for the successful implementation of business intelligence strategy. You should add the following things when building a roadmap:
- Tracking of milestones
- Be proactive and adopt a roadmap when necessary
- Keep an eye on dependencies
- Add new events such as initiatives or product launch
Final Words
Having an in-house IT team is not enough to maintain IT operations on a regular basis. They usually extend their teams following digital transformation. So, you need to ensure appropriate staff that can implement a business intelligence strategy. Your team should have enough expertise to deal with unknown challenges and lead your entire body from the front.
Contrary to team expertise, you will need external guidance at different development stages of the BI plan to make it successful. If you don’t have an IT team, you should look for IT professionals having the capability to make a BI strategy that will uplift your business.
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