How To Develop A Successful Business Intelligence (BI) Strategy

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Top Highlights

• To create a strategy, you must determine three things. How will you deploy the software platform? How will you manage the data for analysis? And how will you enable your people to make informed, data-driven decisions?

• Examples include access to sales performance benchmarks, human resources salary forecasts, and ensuring your shipping department knows what to ship each day. Success occurs from systematically approaching the project with a defined BI strategy, including discovery, planning, and measured execution.

• With business intelligence, data can drive transformation in your organization. This initiative will place trusted, relevant data in the hands of employees so they can make informed decisions every day.

• Your BI strategy needs to first align with your business goals and vision.

• 1. Choose a sponsor

• Organizations who value data in every department appoint a Chief Data Officer to sponsor the BI initiative. The CDO or other executive sponsor needs to consider the support and training required for deployment and consider how to scale this platform to the entire enterprise.

• Keep your sponsor up to date on your progress.

• When you have launched your BI platform, and it’s working as expected, generate some valuable, visible reports to share with your sponsor.

• 2. Choose your BI platform

• Data access and view of relevant content Interactivity with data within a visual interface Ability to dive deeper into data and discover new insights on your own Promote new insight discoveries to a governed environment in a bottom-up approach Collaborate with others on data analysis and sharing visualized analytics

• 3. Identify the key stakeholders and get them involved

• You should bring in a representative from every team affected by your BI plan. Get them involved early and interview them. Ask them how they use data in their work, what is working for them, and what isn’t working for them.

• 4. Assemble your BI team

• These are some of the roles and responsibilities for the BI project team: An IT service owner or analytics director to manage the software platform An enterprise architect who integrates the platform with the existing data architecture A site administrator to organize the content, and create user groups and permissions A data steward to put the data in context and document processes and procedures for using the platform

• You can hire new people or have people fulfill multiple functions if your organization is small. BI platforms ensure that reports and dashboards are accessible and approachable to non-analysts (known as self-service business intelligence).

• Before you deploy business intelligence software, you need to decide what BI means to your organization. Business intelligence means using data to make business decisions.

• Are you using business intelligence to understand and predict financial performance, human resources, supply chain, or inventory changes? Will you be analyzing a combination of these or something else entirely? The scope of analysis within the business needs to be clear before you move on to the next steps.

• What KPIs indicate success in your industry? Competitive analysis is becoming a crucial part of business intelligence. BI tools are allowing organizations to monitor competitors’ performance, changes in the market, and customer behavior changes. You can do this by analyzing competitors’ case studies, blogs, articles, videos, etc.

• 7. Develop a business intelligence roadmap

• Keep track of milestones and dependencies such as when your data warehouse will be ready Keep your eye on the future and adapt your roadmap when needed Be proactive, not reactive