All Need to Know About a Business Intelligence (BI) Strategy

Deeper Customer Insight

With the right BI initiatives, you can learn more about your customers. This includes learning about their personal preferences, purchase history, biases, satisfaction levels, and preferred competitors. Modern BI dashboards can segment audiences into groups, making it easier for different users to review specific audience needs.

From there, your business can make any necessary adjustments to better service your customers. This could mean revising or removing existing products or introducing new products to fill identified gaps.

Faster Reporting and Analysis

Speeding up your data analysis activities helps improve turnaround times. When data is siloed, team members must turn to certain team members or multiple departments to solve business problems or answer questions.

By consolidating data with a BI solution, authorized team members can access easy-to-understand reports and insights in one place. This helps speed up the decision-making process, giving businesses an opportunity to stay competitive.

Forecast Future Outcomes

The advent of big data predictive analytics helps businesses anticipate potential future outcomes. Using BI software, you can identify past and existing trends relevant to the business’s future.

Let’s say you want to forecast the future financial health of your business. You can use BI software to review previous financial records. This could be past revenue and cash flow statements, accounts receivable, investments, and prepaid expenses.

After reviewing your historical financial data, the BI software can present potential events and scenarios. This can help you decide whether to move forward with a specific business initiative. For example, moving into a larger office or releasing a new product.

Ensuring Data Quality and Accuracy

Consolidating data from multiple sources can introduce data quality and accuracy issues. Different data types, sourced from different locations, may be incompatible with your technical stack. Combining multiple data sources may result in mislabeled or duplicated data.

Data cleaning involves fixing or removing faulty, incorrect, or incompatible data. Common data cleaning tasks are fixing structural errors, removing duplicate data, and filtering out unwanted outliers (unusual values that lead to miscalculations).

Assembling the Right Team

Analyzing data requires the expertise of a highly skilled data analytics team. These are dedicated experts who excel in data science, data engineering, and data analytics. At least one team member must assume a managerial or leadership role too.

Problems can arise when data analytics teams don’t work well together. They may disagree on what procedures to follow, dispute findings, and deliver inaccurate or misleading reports. Communication issues can reduce turnaround times.

Outsourcing your data science needs? Look for an established company like Orient Software. Our data science services help companies unlock the potential of their data. We work closely with you to understand your needs, assemble the right team for the job, and follow best industry practices to guarantee success within your time and budget constraints.

Data Security and Governance

Complying with strict security and governance standards is of the utmost importance. It helps safeguard your data against cyber security threats, protect your reputation, and help you avoid costly fines and penalties.

Unfortunately, performing data analytics increases the risk of cybersecurity breaches. Transferring data from one source to another is one such activity. Threat actors can intercept and modify data in transit. If the breach is successful, unsuspecting victims may interact with the data and expose the business to risk.

To overcome data security and governance risks, have your data analytics performed by a reputable team of data scientists. Companies like Boab IT enforce strict cyber security and governance standards. We follow industry-leading standards to protect data from unauthorized access, disclosure, and alteration.

Define Your BI Objectives

Base the objectives of your BI strategy on the needs of your business. Then, base your decisions on those objectives.

For example, let’s say you want to improve customer satisfaction. In that case, you’d need a BI tool to track customer satisfaction metrics. Such metrics may include customer retention, churn rate, average response time, and lifetime value.

By tracking the right customer satisfaction metrics, you can identify aspects of the customer experience that need improving. For example, your BI strategy may reveal that customers are frustrated by slow response times. To address this issue, you could deploy a chatbot to reply to common queries.

Assess Your Current Infrastructure

As you prepare your effective BI strategy, you must assess your existing infrastructure and capabilities. This helps you determine the current state of your data analytics activities. Specifically, the type of data you collect, how you manage that data, and what you do with that data to deliver positive outcomes.

Companies like Orient Software can evaluate your BI maturity model. This is a numerical rating from one to five. One means your BI strategy is disorganized, as in there is no governance, unlinked spreadsheets, and inconsistent data formats. Five means your successful BI strategy is highly optimized, where data drives every aspect of the decision-making process.

By evaluating your current infrastructure, our data scientists can identify gaps. We can then determine the extra data and tools you need to fulfill your business goals. This ensures your business intelligence roadmap is customized to meet your needs.

Choose the Right BI Tools

The best BI platform is compatible with your infrastructure and helps meet your business needs.

Low-code and no-code solutions are a fast, affordable way to incorporate BI capabilities into your business. They are also easy for a non-technical audience to use. However, their limited customization may not suit businesses with complex needs.

Orient Software helps you choose the right BI tools for your business. We choose tools that help you collect the right data (from the right places), organize it properly, and make sense of it. We also ensure that your BI tools are compatible with your existing data architecture.

Encourage Ongoing Collaboration

A successful business intelligence strategy is a collaborative effort. They involve ongoing communication between all key stakeholders, from business owners to employees to data science teams. Cross-department communication is another key ingredient. Team members must be able to communicate and share data seamlessly.

Evaluate your IT partners’ communication skills. They should be prompt, easy to understand, and comfortable with text and voice communication. Furthermore, they should be able to explain technical concepts in layman’s terms.