Data is the new oil. It is increasingly considered as a valuable resource for growing businesses. The volume of data continues to grow rapidly by 500 to 600% worldwide per year. It also includes the amount of corporate data. Early adopters of digitalization are reaping more benefits from Business Intelligence (BI) than others. They impose strong pressure on the competitors who are trying to gain the edge but fail to harness the potential of data in time. They are forced to accelerate the BI implementation to stay relevant and sustain in the market. To become a data-driven organization, the challenges along the road are strenuous. But late adopters have a decisive advantage over the early adopters. They can learn the experience of the latter and make the adoption smoother.
Business Intelligence – Common Misunderstandings:
BI can be found in the top priority list of IT budgets. At the same time, many organizations fail to understand its actual value to the business. The main challenge is to procure budget approval from top-level management. After implementation, the time taken to fetch data from IT is another barrier. The trust-worthiness of the data is usually questioned by different teams when data is stored in a centralized location and processed. This in-turn poses uncertainty to the value of BI.
Some organizations drive their team to bring change rather than manipulating and reporting data. They need an immediate return on investment, reduction in the total cost of ownership and accelerated time-to-value. The scale of Business Intelligence data confuses users. Organizations are uncertain about the processes and doubt the final result. To gain a competitive edge, they want to do much more with BI. But they are unsure of the steps to be taken. They want data that can be used to make quick strategic decisions.
But aside from all that, properly deployed BI is not about taking a quantum leap. It is about maintaining incremental improvements. It is achievable to do consistent minimal changes and with time, organizations can add up to something remarkable.
Strategies to maximize results from BI
An organization should drive value both from the start and during business-as-usual mode by leveraging BI. It is crucial to consider that BI is not a project. It is a strategic approach to help your organization use the power of data effectively in ways that improve your business. To successfully implement BI and maximize results, you need to adopt these best-in-class strategies.
Understand the value of insights
Your focus should be on identifying what your organization strive to achieve. It should not be simply delivering a series of reports as per the request. Driving revenue should be the key factor. You need to identify revenue-boosting opportunities to go after and improve them. Business Intelligence supports you to identify these opportunities. Use it to determine the efficiency of a process. It can help you to reduce cost in critical business situations. With insights from BI, create capabilities to better manage compliance issues. Evaluate if the technical capabilities are not costing you more than necessary to deliver insights.
Manage the conflicting priorities
As business requirements are constantly evolving, opportunity realization should occur in a relevant time. But, the most cost-effective approach to BI is not being agile. It insists on long-term delivery. Slow data procurement impact the value derived from BI. To manage these conflicting priorities, effective Business Intelligence mastery is required.
The value needs to be identified and delivered quickly to your organization. You can’t spend six months to get data needed to enact and react. By then the insight drivers may not be the same and they change as the business requirements change. To manage the conflicting priorities, you need to identify how to deliver value quickly.
Improve Business Engagement
One of the vital aspects of successful BI is to engage the audiences responsible for reports. Without engagement, your BI implementation will never work as expected. While everyone speaks about adoption, this vital aspect is crucial. With mobile BI, people can engage while having necessary information anywhere at any time.
As technology evolves, it opens up ways to drive engagement to data. So the engagement can be driven by understanding BI’s relative nature and value. This means that you should use it to communicate the message of strategy and use the value-driven right metrics to help engage people. You need to evangelise the BI by doing whatever is necessary and best fits your organization.
Your organization should involve those who will be impacted by the data you deliver. You need to engage them throughout the process. They should drive across the process from the time you start to understand the Insights’ drivers, to deliver, test, and implement from both a project and business perspective. This in turn builds trust and involvement through empowerment.
Improve Capabilities
The ultimate goal of the Business Intelligence strategy is to enable your teams to make the most out of data. The enablement includes making teams as self-sufficient and effective in BI. It promotes the effective use of BI in your organization.
Organizations focus on either IT capabilities to build a technically strong BI solution or on a software tool-based training. This often misleads them to forget that the business community also needs to engage with the information. Employees need to be trained to use the BI software and it should not only from a technical perspective but also in making the data meaningful.
The above strategies can help your organization to use Business Intelligence in such a way to maximize results. With an effective deployment and strategic approach, BI can be used to create a difference by making smart business decisions.
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