How To Build A Successful Business Intelligence Strategy 

Building a business intelligence strategy is an incredibly intricate and detailed process. This is because this strategy will play a huge role in the decision-making around key business operations and business goals for the future. Therefore, ensuring that you get your bi-strategy roadmap as accurate and as clear as possible will be imperative to business success and smashing KPIs going forward.

While business intelligence tools are still in their infancy, their popularity and continued growth are undeniable. Over 26% of businesses globally are said to utilise business intelligence tools and this number is not slowing down. These phenomenal data visualisation tools allow businesses to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors and are therefore incredibly powerful yet underutilised tools.

In this article, we will detail what exactly a business intelligence strategy is, and how it can benefit businesses and also offer you some expert tips on how to build a successful business intelligence strategy.

What Is A Business Intelligence Strategy? 

Business intelligence is a data source that allows businesses to combine different analytics such as predictive analytics, business analytics, data visualisation, data mining, data tools and data integration. These metrics then allow businesses to make data-driven business decisions on things such as business objectives, business performance, business needs, and stakeholder needs.

A business intelligence strategy is a blueprint that allows for these data-driven decisions to be made. The strategy allows businesses to effectively gather, analyse, and utilise data in order to improve overall business objectives and performance. A highly efficient bi strategy will not only highlight the different technologies and tools that will be used but will also outline the business's specific goals, data governance practices as well and the roles of key stakeholders and end users.

Why Businesses Use Business Intelligence Strategies 

Businesses tend to use business intelligence tools and business intelligence strategies for a number of different reasons. One of the main reasons is that it allows businesses to be able to track their performance through the use of data spreadsheets. With this data collection businesses can then make better decisions on business operations and key performance indicators (KPIs) which will help them to grow their business and its performance.

Another reason behind the use of bi tools in businesses is that it allows businesses to easily understand data through simple dashboards. With businesses today obtaining so much data, data management and data analysis can be incredibly complex. Bi systems make this data so much more digestible for businesses and provide them with actionable insights that can help them to better their performance and overall business milestones.

In addition to this, business intelligence software offers businesses countless other benefits that can help them gain a competitive advantage over their competition. While the tools are still in their infancy, their capabilities and possibilities are growing constantly. There is no doubt that the popularity of this bi software will continually grow and provide businesses with amazing data access, data quality and insights that will help them to grow exponentially.

5 Tips To Build A Successful Business Intelligence Strategy

Building a successful business intelligence strategy is not an easy feat. You need to make sure that you are utilising the data you are receiving in the most effective and efficient ways. Bi platforms give you all of the information you need to succeed, but it is down to what you do with this data to bring a real benefit and boost to your business.

Here are 5 valuable tips that will help you to ensure that your business intelligence strategy is a successful one:

Ensure You Have Clear Business Objectives 

One of the most important tips for ensuring your business intelligence strategy is successful is knowing exactly what you want out of it. Setting clear business objectives and business goals is vital for optimising the data you will obtain through bi tools.

These objectives will help you to align your bi strategy with the overall goals that your business has. This will allow you to tailor your bi-roadmap to show and understand the data you need in order to achieve your specific milestones. This means that all of the data in which is collected via the bi platforms will have actionable insights that will help your business to grow in the direction you intend.

In addition to this, not setting clear goals can make your data far more difficult to understand from a performance standpoint. This is because your dashboard may be full of data that is not really of any use to you and the growth of your business. Clear objectives ensure that this confusion and data waste is avoided.

 Identify The Sources Of Your Data 

Knowing the sources of your data is vital for a successful bid strategy, this is because if you want to obtain valuable insights from your data then you must know where it has come from. In the digital world we live in today, the amount of data that a company obtains and stores can at times be overwhelming. This data can be both internal and external, which can be very complicated to understand.

You should ensure that your business is able to easily identify internal data, external data and personal data from one another to give the most accurate and valuable insights. Once you have identified the sources of your data it is far easier to clean the data up to make it more easily digestible and actionable.

Ensure A Data Governance Framework Is Put In Place

Data governance is incredibly important when it comes to data. This is because it is the process of managing the availability, usability, integrity and security of the vast amount of data a business stores. It is so integral as a big percentage of the data will be classified and if not protected correctly could land your business in legal trouble.

In regards to data, data governance frameworks will help to ensure that the policies and rules that your business has apply to all of the data within your business or organisation. It will ensure that the data you are providing to individuals, whether they be business leaders or data stewards, is trusted and secure.

 Ensure Proper Training For Your Team 

While business intelligence makes data more digestible and simple, turning the data into profitable decisions takes a trained team. Investing in a bi tool but not investing in the proper training for your team could be a contributing factor to you not getting the most out of the amazing datasets that bi platforms provide.

In order to have a successful business intelligence strategy, you must have the expertise to fully understand and utilize the data by turning it into actionable insights. This is why you must ensure that your team is fully trained and comfortable with all of the latest BI tools, best practices and technologies.

Take Your Data Security Seriously 

Due to the increasing amount of data that businesses are collecting, ensuring that your data security is tight may be one of the most important things you can do. The last thing you want is to be involved in a data leak that can result in data getting into the wrong hands and your business damaging its reputation.

Implementing strong data security measures as well as ensuring that all data is encrypted and protected through your business intelligence strategy will help to avoid any security risk. If your BI plan does not feature strong enough security measures then you are not only putting important data about your business at risk but also sensitive data from customers at risk. This will not only damage your relationship with your customer but could also end in legal trouble.

Book your Business Intelligence Data Strategy Workshop today

Here at Catalyst-Bi, we have a huge team of the very best business intelligence consultants. Our industry-leading bi-consultants will help you build a data strategy that is essential for organisations to stay relevant, competitive, and innovative amidst constant change. Because data is vast, dynamic comes in many different formats, extracting value can be challenging and to harness data’s full potential requires an end to end modern strategy.