Gartner’s CIO survey highlighted that Business Intelligence (BI) is one of the top business priorities. BI is known to have positive impact on business performance of an enterprise, dramatically improving the ability to accomplish the mission by making timely and smart decisions at any level of the business.
Additionally, Forrester Research has provided a foreseeable future in their recent report that we are competing on information, where “all products and services continue to become more commoditised in our global economy”. As a results, if the two businesses share the same marketing personas and customer insight, the one who has earlier information will have significant advantages over the other. That’s why we need BI.
Modern BI and analytical tools – social interaction, mobility, cloud, and technology – now enable data democratisation across the business, thereby enabling individual capabilities to deliver higher performance.
“An effective information network is like a spider web. It gives the spider all movements of its prey to prepare for a good attack.”
Building a BI strategy
Unfortunately, despite all technology innovations in data and information management, companies are still held back. Technological advancement is only on pace with a minority of businesses, while still keeping a far distance ahead for others. Furthermore, BI challenges are based not only on the company’s size but also on its sophistication level around data analytics.
Most companies encounter the problem of integration in their BI strategy execution. As business grows, the organisation capabilities as well as changing technology base have left companies with complex system landscapes. They have so much data at hand that they don’t know where to start, and have no idea how to optimise the values of that data. They end up being overwhelmed by silos and have so little chance to manipulate the data into valuable information.
Read more:Building an Organisation-Wide Dashboard: A Guide for Senior Executives
However, middleware technology came out recently as a solution for integration problems. This technology can quickly and easily connect disparate systems into a single whole, allowing companies to upgrade or even fail to execute without taking down all installed applications.
With integration forced into the picture, companies need to drive further to adopt additional BI strategies based on their position on the evolutionary scale. Here are 3 common organisational categories and their identical BI strategies to empower organisational data management processes.
1. Tactical
Definition: Companies focused on tracking and measuring projected business performance against actuals. They prioritise the need to meet basic reporting and regulatory requirements over assessing “how and why” of decision-making. This action is time-consuming, manual, and outdated.
Key strategies:
- Set clear goals for data analytics activities to get information and analytics controlled in one business area.
- Get buy-in from key stakeholders by including them from the beginning in the BI strategy process and providing them with clear insight on how things change to avoid conflicts.
- Start small by identifying areas that are most affected because of a lack of information or data and focus on solving the problem in that area only. This gives you a solid foundation to expand your efforts.
Read more:The Use of Spreadsheets and Modern Cloud Adoption in Businesses
2. Strategic
Definition: Companies use data to steer businesses rather than measuring past business performance. They still rely on IT for BI and analytical tools, thus limiting in-depth use of information.
Key strategies:
- Expand the availability of user-driven BI and analytical tools through the use of packaged BI solutions to reduce the dependence on your IT department.
- Reduce the time employees spend finding information and increase analytical time to maximise the power of data and information.
- Provide a foundation for the long term by applying technologies that are flexible enough to adapt to the market while not changing your organisation’s processes.
3. Driver
Definition: Companies master the art of collecting information and move on to the process of how best to take advantage of it. They are working to put analytics in employees’ hands through BI and analytical tools. However, as the volume of data and information grows, these businesses must find the right path to manage it all.
Key strategies:
- Investing in emerging technologies that can take your BI efforts to the next level, which should include social business and big data to give you control over data democratisation as well as data management for better business performance.
Business Intelligence and analytics solutions are widely considered by CIOs and analysts in top organisations around the globe because of their capabilities to manage a great amount of data without frustrating employees’ working processes. By taking steps to data democratisation, companies can now put the power of information in the hands of any end-users, the bottom line gets the most value from information and enhances business performance as a whole.
