Planning Analytics

The effective use of business intelligence has the potential to support and develop any business. The key is the efficient use of business intelligence.

Building a reliable business intelligence (BI) strategy for your company can be very powerful - if it’s done accurately. The key to making it right? Producing a complete strategy that mixes historical BI with forward-looking predictive analytics.

A well-produced BI solution is one of the beneficial factors of a company’s wellbeing. It contributes to enhancing your business by enabling proactive optimization and growing a BI-driven business. A well-thought-out business intelligence strategy guarantees ROI from actual investments into a BI solution.

What is BI and How It Can Improve Your Business

BI is actually a comprehensive analytics solution that you can manage to better understand your business and the state of the market that you’re developing in. The effective word here is comprehensive: for BI to work, you have to begin from the ground up and guarantee that you don’t leave out any key elements.

This indicates that, at the very least, your BI plan must cover: your team, your sources, your strategy, and your data storage. That announced, checking these things off the list is no easy job, as doing so needs exact construction and implementation. Let’s go into the specifics:

How to Build Your BI Strategy

There’s a lot to think about when it comes to designing and implementing a new BI strategy. Here are the four main elements that must be discussed:

1. Your BI Roadmap

At its focus, BI is all about analytics and information, which indicates that you need to have both of those items in order if you want a robust overall strategy. You need to know and prepare the following:

• Report and analytics requirements: What are the main analytics that you need to keep a record of? What metrics are most vital for you to develop your strategies? Where is that data coming from? Discover your primary needs and begin building your strategy from there.

• Industry KPIs: Don’t just think about your business. Examine your industry KPIs - like transactions, ROI and profit boundaries - and develop a firm knowledge of these benchmarks so that you know specifically how your business is doing in the big picture.

• Custom KPIs: There are going to be business-specificc metrics that you’ll need to keep a record of. Set these up first on so you know what to track and how you’re arranging.

• Past data: You can’t fully know your business’ growth unless you control its changes over the period. Keeping track of historical information can help you get a bird’s eye look of your business. This, in turn, can assist you in learning and pinpointing correctly where your efforts are fighting or where you need to make axles in your plans.

• BI Clients: Think who will be managing your BI solution and provide to their requirements.

2. Your BI Team

At this case, BI includes a lot of work, which indicates that you need to make sure that your team can definitely organize their duties and carry out a powerful BI strategy. Or you can hire a business intelligence firm that can do all of this and more. 

Here are the five primary BI “roles” to include in your company. Keep in mind; this doesn’t mean you need five separate people performing these tasks, but rather that you should confirm that someone on your team has the bandwidth and ability to fill these shoes:

• Head of BI: Provided with business and technological abilities, this person will build and execute the BI strategies that produce insights and grow your company.

• BI Developer: Your developer will produce and build data pipelines to integrate data from various references, assuring that all of your most valuable information is properly extracted, converted and loaded into your data repository.

• Data/business analyst: The analyst collects, processes and summarizes data. He then uses this data to supply their organization with records, summaries, and visualizations, thereby changing the analytics into understandable, actionable insights.

• DBA: This specialist is in charge of all things database-related. The DBA supports database operations, creates new database applications, assists existing database applications, and controls an organization’s data and metadata.

• Data Scientist: The data scientist uses analytical instruments, computer programming, statistics, and machine learning to pull out actionable insights from big data.

Then why do you necessitate all of these “roles” filled on your organization? BI is entirely useless if it’s done wrong or imperfectly, and the reality is that it will be unfinished without dedicated team parts.

Consider it: without performed BI team members, existing workers will have to split their time and take between handling their analytics and focusing on other core features of their job. In such cases, BI will always come next, which means that certain aspects of the job will most surely fall through the cracks.

This is particularly true if there is no one in the organization that’s holding the team accountable and assuring that BI works don’t go to waste, so it’s especially helpful to have someone in your upper administration as part of your BI team and assistance system.

3. Your Data Sources

Most companies these days have data coming in from many different references, and all of this data must be analyzed comprehensively to have an authentic and effective BI strategy. This indicates that you have to collect and make your:

• Core data: Data produced by your business via online shop, mobile app, website, etc.

• Peripheral data: Data produced from bought products or services, like a CRM or an analytics system.

• External data: Data collected from things like sensibility analysis.

The initial step here, then, is figuring out what data references you have, what information is most important from each source, and how to look at them comprehensively. This leads us to our next point - data warehouse.

4. Your Data Warehouse

Once you understand the what of your data references, you have to choose on where. For most companies, of course, this involves choosing and building a data storehouse. If they’re made correctly, data warehouses can provide you a comprehensive view of your company’s records so that you can know how well your efforts are working and make important strategic choices. Once again, though, it’s all about using your time and doing it perfectly. For DWH’s, this indicates determining something like:

• DB Size
• Concurrency
• Scaling
• Schema design
• Cloud vs On-premise

Concentrating on these four elements and developing them is the first step to building a comprehensive and valuable BI strategy for your business. Of course, this is simply a cursory summary, not a complete analysis of BI.

For a step-by-step analysis, you can check out our eBook How to Build an End-to-End BI Solution or contact one of our solution experts today.