Tips to Develop a Successful Business Intelligence Strategy

A business intelligence strategy is the way forward for organizations looking to derive benefits for the future. Since we have stepped in the digital age of data, it is imperative that organizations realize just how important it is to use intelligence generated from data in their day-to-day organizations.

A good business intelligence strategy can be developed by determining a total of three basic things. How do you plan to deploy the software development platform? How you plan to manage the data and how well informed you want the people around you or the key stakeholders of your business to be.

A business intelligence strategy, when properly implemented, will help you generate actionable insights and use those insights for decisions based on data and actual facts. Examples of insights generated through a business intelligence strategy include setting the salary for human resource workers, setting benchmarks for future work and determining what shipping departments can ship every day.

The systematic approach towards business intelligence is bound to achieve success in the long run, and give organizations the prowess they need.

In this article, we take a look at the tips and steps you can follow to implement Business Intelligence in your organization. This article will help you start and implement a business intelligence strategy that you can follow in the long run.

Choose a Business Intelligence Platform

A business intelligence platform can help achieve a lot in the long run. Once you have the required budget for your initiative, you can start the process by choosing a business intelligence platform. You should start the process by evaluating the business intelligence platforms at your disposal.

A number of platforms today come with common functionalities and pros and cons. These pros and cons are similar in nature and go to prove just how similar different platforms can be.

You should choose a good business intelligence platform, based on how it adheres to the following features:

• How the platform provides access to data and all content deemed relevant to you.
• The ability of the content to dive deeper within your content requirements and give you deeper insights.
• The level of interactivity you can have with the data in the platform.
• The platform’s ability to help promote new discoveries and give you a bottoms-up approach.
• The data analyst skill set to collaborate with others through the platform.

Include Key Stakeholders

A business intelligence feature may be based on IT and software, but that doesn’t mean it is in any way restricted to the IT department only. A good business intelligence platform should be diversified in nature and should include raw financial data, along with other information that can be useful for the organization. This data should be accessible to all stakeholders through a de-facto provision within the platform.

Representatives from each team in your organization should have access to the business intelligence platform and should use that access to derive the results they want. Ask all key stakeholders to utilize the data they have available to them.

Assemble a BI Team

Your business intelligence team is the brains behind the technology of a BI platform. The team is tasked with taking the intelligence forward and deriving the results from the process. You can stack up your team with new hirings or take members from the organization to form an exclusive team for the project.

Some of the roles that you can distribute across members of the tech team that you form, are:

• An IT service owner for managing the software platform and to create analytics.
• A site administrator to create user groups and to organize the content for permissions.
• An enterprise architecture for managing the architecture of the existing data platforms
• A data steward for putting the data and document processes in context.

Besides these roles and responsibilities, you also need to create a team of other professionals. You need to understand your needs and create a team based on what’s best for you.

Define the Scope of Your BI Platform

Before you focus on the implementation of a BI platform, you should determine the scope of implementation in your organization and what you want to achieve through the program. You need to determine how business implementation will work for you and your organization in day-to-day operations. You also need to determine which departments will be using BI in what capacity.

There are a number of techniques you can apply to derive benefits from your business intelligence platform. You can start by using business intelligence to understand and implement efficiency over the board.

Prepare a Data Infrastructure

Business Intelligence platforms typically source data from a data warehouse. With the use of modern BI solutions, organizations can analyze data as part of their infrastructure.

Data is differentiated on the basis of trusted and untrusted sources. Trusted data sources are stored in spreadsheets and other documents. The BI team needs to prepare a data infrastructure, which is necessary for deploying the right data to the right BI platform.

Develop a Roadmap

The BI team working on the project should identify and develop a roadmap that they can implement for broader success. Some of the things that can be considered as part of this initiative, include:

• Keeping a track of all dependencies and milestones for your data warehouse to be ready.
• Develop a proactive approach, rather than a reactive one.
• Keep your eyes set on the future and develop a roadmap that is based on future progress.

Your platform’s progress should come with a finite deadline that you can follow to meet your BI goals and implement the strategies you have in mind.