A Business Intelligence Strategy is essentially a guide for making informed decisions on how to use data in your company.
Today, business owners rely on data about clients’ preferences, tastes, likes and dislikes, and even their demographics.
This helps to ensure they are effective and stay ahead of the competition. It also helps to ensure that they serve their customers correctly and make sales.
In this article, we shall look at how to successfully implement Business Intelligence.
What Is Business Intelligence?
Business Intelligence is a set of tools, materials, applications, and solutions used to gather business data. It also involves analyzing and interpreting the data in a way that can be used in achieving organizational goals.
Business Intelligence has become widely popular, with its market accounting for
USD 22.16 billion in 2020. Business Intelligence Strategies usually involve advanced analytics like collecting data, text mining, and statistical analysis.
Utilizing the data gathered allows companies to personalize services, improve product features, forecast sales, and improve overall performance.
How Data Is Collected for Business Intelligence
Data collection is the foundation upon which business intelligence rests.
Several data collection methods are usually employed to gather information.
Online and physical surveys, interviews, and focus groups allow you to collect data by listening to/ reading views directly from the source. These methods allow you to gather feedback about new products and new features from your target audience.
Observation, online tracking, and social media monitoring allow you not just to hear what your target is saying but to see firsthand how they are interacting with your products. This can be done easily with the use of proxy servers.
Proxy servers allow you to surf websites for information without getting noticed. You can collect data from social media and see how your customers are reviewing competitors.
Another reason to keep using proxies is that they protect your email account system. You can keep using free proxies to encrypt your communications, making it more difficult for hackers to intercept them. Suppose you’re collecting data through email and receive a lot of messages daily. In that case, proxies can help protect you from those containing malicious URLs or attachments.
Forms are also useful in gathering data, especially demographic characteristics such as contact information. Forms are easy to set up and use and are relatively inexpensive.
6 Tips for Implementing Business Intelligence Successfully
Business intelligence will determine how well a company can make the needed changes, improve performance, forecast sales, and stay ahead of the competition. Here are 6 tips for successfully implementing Business Intelligence
1. Develop a Strategy
The first step to successfully implementing a Business Intelligence strategy is to plan carefully. When strategies are not well laid out, data discrepancies and conflicting instructions could ruin the whole process.
One of the first steps to take is to have a record of all available data. Then decide what new data you need and how they will be obtained.
The next step is to define your objectives clearly. What are you hoping to achieve with the whole process? Is it aimed at cost-cutting? Or perhaps to improve workflow?
Also, decide if the BI system you’re implementing will retain existing structures or replace them. Knowing exactly where you want to go will help you decide the most efficient ways to get there.
2. Put the Implementation Team Together
Once you have decided what and how the next phase is to decide who. Ideally, the Business Intelligence implementation team should include members from all departments and all stakeholders who handle business data.
This ensures that everyone is on board with changes and expectations. You would require; a site administrator, an enterprise architect, a data steward or data mining specialist, an IT expert, and of course, a project manager.
You can outsource some of the roles and functions if your organization is small or lacks the manpower for specific tasks.
3. Decide the Key Performance Indices That Are Important
It is essential that you know exactly what your company’s struggles are, which KPIs are huge determinants of success and which your company can do without.
It helps to split KPIs into different categories, those relating to company finances, marketing, customer metrics, Human resources, and project management. Then decide what Performance Indices are critical for each category.
It also helps to know which of the KPIs cut across all sections of the organization and which will be executed and monitored at department levels.
4. Choose a Good Software Vendor
Businesses today rely heavily on Information Technology. So, implementing Business Intelligence would require the use of software tools. In choosing a software vendor, you need to make sure that they have sufficient experience.
They must also have a qualified team of professionals who know exactly what you need. They should also be able to advise on the Right BI tools that will meet your goals and give the desired results.
5. Get Your Data Infrastructure Ready
Any successful Business Intelligence Strategy must have clear sources from which data will be sourced to perform accurate analysis. BI platforms typically import data from data banks. Advanced Business Intelligence allows you to analyze data from different sources.
Two types of data generally exist, trusted and untrusted data. Trusted data is easy to store in databases.
Data that has been previously used in business analytics belong to this category. Untrusted data include information from conversations with customers, emails, news articles, business journals, etc. With advanced BI, untrusted data can be cleaned and analyzed.
6. Prepare Your Data
Preparing data can be time-consuming. This is because you would need to synchronize data from different departments. Once this has been achieved, you must ensure that the data is valid, complete, consistent, and relevant.
Data accuracy and uniqueness are also important. You can also decide to migrate your data. This may become necessary if the data storage platform you use will not work well for effective Business Intelligence.
Conclusion
To successfully implement Business Intelligence, it is recommended that you start small. You can launch a trial with just a few KPIs to see how well it works and then proceed to any necessary adjustments and implement them on a larger scale.
You must also make sure that data is secure. It should be easy for stakeholders to have access to and work with data. Monitoring and evaluating the process is of utmost importance. So, create a feedback loop where all stakeholders will be updated regularly and necessary corrections made on time.
About the Author
Daniel Martin loves building winning content teams. Over the past few years, he has built high-performance teams that have produced engaging content enjoyed by millions of users. After working in the Aviation industry for 9 years, today Dani applies his international team-building experience in LinkDoctor to assist in solving his client’s challenges. Dani also enjoys photography and playing the carrom board.