Business intelligence (BI) is essential for organizations that want to gain a competitive advantage over their competition and stay relevant in the ever-changing business landscape. Deploying a BI tool into your operation will invariably drive growth, create new opportunities, and help in informed decision-making.
As a business owner, you can access business intelligence solutions to collect meaningful insights to inform strategies that enhance business performance management. According to MicroStrategy, over 65% of companies worldwide are making substantial investments in data analytics, including business intelligence. To stay ahead of the competition, you must find ways to improve and optimize your BI system.
1. Develop a business intelligence strategy.
Before deploying a BI tool, you need to know and understand how business intelligence works. So you know, the term business intelligence (BI) encompasses applications, tools, infrastructure, and best practices that provide access to data sources.
Your organization requires business intelligence to make timely, well-informed business decisions. Besides, BI enables data visualization to help you see and understand business data faster. In addition, it’ll help you identify emerging trends and derive valuable insight.
That said, you must come up with a foolproof business intelligence strategy for optimal business performance. First, you need to determine which data set is going to go into the BI system. This data will play an integral role in implementing your strategy.
Furthermore, your business intelligence strategy must anticipate and reflect your business needs. Ideally, a BI strategy should cover business areas such as executive, sales, finance, purchasing and logistics, marketing, and information technology (IT).
BI can serve as a decision support system for every layer of your organization. The key takeaway is that the right BI strategy can convert information into data that drive informed decisions. After implementing your BI strategy, ensure your organization’s objectives align with your key performance indicators (KPIs).
2. Deploy a business intelligence tool.
Before now, data analysts had to deconstruct a spreadsheet to access information that supports an idea. Thanks to BI platforms, you can access actionable data at a glance from the dashboard and data visualization. With a dashboard, you can save time on accessing insights and focus more on data analysis.
One way to boost your business intelligence is to incorporate business intelligence software into your BI processes. BI software converts business data into actionable insights needed to turn leads into sales and investment into profit. The good thing about a BI tool is that it eliminates manual data entry, which invariably reduces errors. In many ways, BI automation tools are faster and more efficient than human beings. Moreover, the right BI software will help you implement your business intelligence strategy successfully.
Finding the right BI solution for your organization can be daunting, especially when you don’t know what to look out for. Consider choosing an online cloud-based BI solution or an on-premise solution. Opt for a vendor that offers free trials so you can see firsthand if the software suits your business.
3. Develop a data storage plan.
Many companies like to store their data in an isolated data mart because it’s relatively faster and cheaper. The downside to data mart is that the business user may need to create alternative storage plans whenever there’s a need for additional storage. As a business owner, you need to create a data storage plan that serves your organization’s data storage needs.
That said, you may need to build a physical data warehouse or upgrade the semantic layers to sync with operational systems. A data warehouse allows you access to advanced analytics features. These features enable your BI system to make better business decisions through predictive models.
Once you have made adequate provisions for data storage, it’s essential to keep your business’s data clean. There’s no gainsaying that clean data is vital for the success of business intelligence strategy. More so, cleaning data entails cleaning your analytics.
