Having a good business intelligence strategy requires more than just the knowledge of data for implementing it into your business. It is never enough to have only a tool for data-driven decisions for your company.
Business Intelligence Market refers to practices of collecting, analyzing, and using the business information to drive future decisions and access opportunities in the market.
Common practices of business intelligence include data mining, statistics, big data, data analytics, etc. Business intelligence drives the business using these techniques of data collections and analysis.
Since every company, not only data companies, have a lot of market data and other operational data to analyze business intelligence proving to be an important department for many multinational companies.
Let us step by step look at easy strategies for implementing business intelligence for your company;
1) Know your Market
When it comes to analyzing your business for future opportunities, knowing where you stand in the market is an important step.
There are various charts that can be accessed to know where you stand in the market. They also help you form strategies for your business.
2) Plan your Objectives
Once you know your market and the opportunity it offers, it is important that you set your goal not to fall into the trap of doing everything. Data is not useful if it is not backed by any business objectives.
Along with knowing the business objective setting timelines for the same is also very important. Asking questions like; How much revenue did the particular department make last year? How is this analysis going to help increase revenue? How much revenue can be generated?
Only when you know your objectives well and clear, will you be able to use the data insights properly for propelling the growth of your company.
After planning objectives, you must decide the KPIs i.e, key performance indicators for your business. KPIs can be defined for all the departments of your business, including finance.
3) Choose a Sponsor
Business intelligence may come across as a completely data-driven task, but the final objective of the process is to increase revenue and sales. That is the reason why placing a CTO is not exactly the best thing to do.
The decision should be finance objective-driven and hence it is important you place a CFO as a sponsor to spearhead this process especially if you are starting out.
Appointing a CDO is another important step. Although they might not be the sponsor they definitely should be important decision-makers for the business intelligence market.
4) Define Data analysis Techniques
Data collected according to your objective needs to be analyzed. After analysis, the insights need to be shared with other departments.
Now when we are talking about data, we need to remember that this is millions of worth of data and that the data is hundreds of GBs worth of memory. A company needs to decide how they are going to share that data and analyze it as well.
Some organizations prefer a decentralized approach towards their data analysis within their companies. While others prefer the Centralised approach. A team of good scientists plays a vital role when it comes to data analysis and distribution.
For many companies, this data is embedded in their product or service. For them, the strategy for embedding the data is important.
Also, the question of how to communicate your data insights with your customer remains. Not only with your customers but also with your investors, partners, stakeholders, etc need to be informed about these data insights.
4) Deliver and reiterate
Once the data is analyzed, delivering the solution using this data is important. It might be too early to think about delivering the solutions at this stage. In this stage forming a strategy is a priority. But for a good strategy taking into consideration how the solution will be delivered using BI is also important.
5) Find problem areas
As stated earlier, delivering a solution is not an easy task and it is not even included in the strategy but before delivering the solution, it is important to assess the current situation and problems that can arise.
Now that all your data is shared and analyzed with the right people working for the same it is now the time to define the process and people to deploy the solution.
This is also the stage where documentation comes into the picture. Document everything right from things that worked and didn’t work. What could be implemented in the future? What opportunities can this strategy bring to the table?
Conclusion
The correct BI strategy can empower your business. Analyzing the data and coming up with the roadmap can look a bit daunting in the beginning but will take your business to new lengths.
