This month, we’re going to highlight a series of thought leader perspectives on business intelligence. Our ability to capture, analyze and leverage insights from data has never been more robust. When you implement a business intelligence strategy, you’ll be able to make better decisions that will help your business run smoother and more efficiently. You can also use this information to identify trends to increase your revenue. When used effectively, a business intelligence strategy can provide a positive impact on virtually every aspect of your operations.
Understanding business intelligence solutions and identifying the best options for your specific needs can be overwhelming. Before committing to a specific strategy, it’s important to become more familiar with what business intelligence is and what it can accomplish.
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While subsequent articles will provide a deeper dive into business intelligence, we feel that it’s important to start with an overview to ensure you have the proper context to understand the specific nuances that we’ll discuss later this month. We recommend that you read the following article to gain a deeper insight into how business intelligence can benefit your business:
The Role of Business Intelligence: What It Is and Why It Matters
Webolutions can provide the guidance you need to ensure your business intelligence efforts are successful. Our team has extensive experience setting up and managing business intelligence strategies for companies in a wide range of industries. We’ll work closely with your team to understand your specific needs and goals. We’ll then set up all proper data pipelines and identify the ideal BI solution for your business. In addition, our Real-Time Performance Intelligence™ models provide the insightful, actionable information you need in an easy to process manner that helps you better understand critical information and trends.
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Key Takeaways from this Article
Business intelligence (BI) is an umbrella term that encompasses the ways in which you collect, store, analyze and report data generated by your operations to make more informed decisions moving forward. This ensures that your decisions are guided by comprehensive data which tells a complete picture, rather than isolated anecdotal evidence or gut instincts. When your actions are grounded in data-driven insights, you’re much more likely to make choices that will achieve your goals.
When you’ve implemented a strong BI strategy at your company, you’ll have highly accurate, comprehensive and organized data that can help you make informed decisions in just about any aspect of your business. These tools can be used by just about every team at your company. Common uses of BI include:
- Measuring the performance of your KPIs and other metrics against benchmarks and goals you’ve established
- Visualizing the volume of website traffic over time
- Evaluating the performance of your marketing efforts
- Tracking potential customers as they move through your sales funnel
- Segmenting users by demographic characteristics
- Creating reports to be used by your executives and team members for planning and decision making
While business intelligence traditionally required an in-house team of data analysts, there are a wide range of self-service BI solutions available today. Self-service BI allows everyone on your team to access and analyze your data without the need for a specialized data analysis background. These tools make business intelligence more accessible to your entire team, and it frees up your data analysts to perform more advanced tasks.
When evaluating BI solutions for your business, make sure to consider the following:
- Connections to data sources – You need to ensure your BI tool can integrate with your other solutions used for data storage and can access the most up-to-date data at all times.
- Data querying – Your BI tool should be able to make it easy to connect queries from different data sources and combine them into a new aggregate source for additional insights.
- Data visualization and dashboards – Make sure your BI tool can deliver information in a variety of chart types, and ideally provides some level of customization for your charts. Your tool should also be able to create dashboards which track all of your charts and key business metrics in one location.
- Data analysis – Your BI tool should have the ability to provide a variety of descriptive and diagnostic analysis, and you should be able to modify your queries to gain deeper insights.
- Data availability – Make sure your BI tool allows you to easily add new users and provides different levels of permissions for different stakeholders.
- Deployment method – In general, cloud-based BI solutions provide more benefits than on-premises server-based solutions.
- Application support – There will be a learning curve for any BI solution your company adopts. Make sure to evaluate the support resources provided by the tool to help get your team up to speed as fast as possible.
Putting this Information into Practice
Before implementing a BI strategy at your company, you’ll need to do some planning:
Make sure the tools you’re considering can provide the solutions you need
- Outline how you expect to use your BI tools at your company
- Identify the top priorities in what you need from a business intelligence solution
- Rank BI tool features so that you can understand what is most important when assessing the tradeoffs you’ll have to make when choosing between different options
- Establish an effective data pipeline
- You need a functioning data pipeline to collect and store the information your BI solution will analyze
- Make sure your data is organized properly before you engage in any analysis
- All team members who manage data will need to be aligned regarding the needs of your users to ensure your analysis delivers actionable insights
- Educate your team
- Adopting new business intelligence tools can often be daunting for your team, and proper education is crucial to the success of your efforts
- Education will not only facilitate faster adoption, but ensure your team members are gaining accurate insights from the data being analyzed
- Identify a team member to spearhead the implementation of your new BI strategy, and empower this person to provide the rest of your team with the tools and knowledge necessary to leverage your new system to its fullest
Make sure the tools you’re considering can provide the solutions you need
Let Webolutions Help
It’s understandable if you find the ins and outs of business intelligence to be a bit overwhelming. It’s a complex, multifaceted strategy that when leveraged correctly, can help your business thrive. But when not implemented properly, your business intelligence strategy may fail to yield the results your company needs.
To speak with one of our consultants about developing true business intelligence for your company of at least $5 million in annual sales, call us at 303-300-2640 and request a Free Business Intelligence Review. During this 30-minute introduction, we work together to help you better understand this system, discuss your business goals, and start outlining your plan. You can also email any questions to info@webolutions.com.
Webolutions is a full-spectrum business consulting and strategic implementation company. We help businesses across the country identify and effectively bring their unique story life, allowing them to scale faster, smarter and easier.
Our specific areas of expertise include:
- Differentiating Brand Development
- Marketing & Communications Strategies
- Customer Journey Planning & Implementation
- Enterprise Website & Application Development
- Systems Integration
- Organizational Development Strategies
- Team Alignment & Performance Solutions
- Business Performance Intelligence Systems
