Business Intelligence Strategy: Steps, Best Practices, and Templates

Business Intelligence Strategy: Steps, Best Practices, and Templates

Your business generates A LOT of data – make sure you’re doing something with it. How to turn that data into a bottom-line boost with a BI strategy.

Why Do Companies Need a BI Strategy
Business intelligence is a catch-all term that includes the processes of collecting, storing and analyzing data from your business to improve performance. To boost performance, you likely set goals for your company, and have questions for how to achieve those goals. For example, a goal might be to increase your profit margin by 2% in the next fiscal year, and a question might be how to improve efficiency in processes to make your company more profitable. Achieving those goals and answering specific questions is a big part of BI. Business intelligence tools can help by mining the data to uncover trends in large data sets, report this analysis so you can make conclusions about the data and then benchmark future efforts against past performance and even industry standards. In this case, BI tools might help uncover common and costly supply chain disruptions, underperforming business units or other bottlenecks. By making direct queries and visualizing data, you can use customer, operations and performance data to help grow your company and stay competitive. A BI strategy provides insights on where to make improvements in how you manage your data, analysis, reporting and decisions made from the insights.

The Benefits of a BI Strategy
Getting the right software for BI tools is just the first step. Next you need to identify how data generated by your business will be managed and reported on. By including not just the platforms, but also who will use the software, when it should be used and how it can be used, you’ll benefit from faster implementation and more varied reports and visualizations in your dashboards. For example, you can boost revenue with sales performance dashboards, or optimize human resources functions with salary and employee performance information. Systematically approaching the discovery, analysis and reporting of data across your business can make the use of BI more efficient.

Other benefits of a business intelligence strategy include:

Faster reporting and analysis
One of the major benefits of a robust BI is reliable and quick self-service features. When users have questions they’d like answered with the help of business data, they don’t have to turn to an IT team, submit a request and wait for a person to manually mine the data, structure it, analyze it and return it. Instead, you can trust that your team will have access to easy-to-understand insights served up in dashboards and other reports garnered from accurate data. Whether it’s specific research into a topic (e.g., a supply chain manager wanting to understand lead times), or general inquiries into progress toward business goals, creating a BI strategy can benefit all levels of your business.

Mitigate risks
Let’s say your retail company is considering expanding into a new, larger location. There’s potential for a great return on this investment, with more space to store inventory and offer more products to customers. But the decision to do so comes with significant risk. While no one can predict the future, we can use data to help mitigate that financial risk by forecasting future conditions based off historical trends and other data. Significant business decisions frequently carry some risk. And data can help you make better informed decisions and understand that risk before taking the plunge.

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