Getting the Information You Need from Business Intelligence

Poorly implemented business intelligence initiatives are not only costly and difficult to maintain, but they can produce inaccurate information as well.  If you’re looking to start a business intelligence project for your company or improve an existing one, these recommendations should help your company get the most out of BI.  Determine What You Need FirstOften, companies will jump into a business intelligence program without first determining what they need from it.  Find out what the end users need specifically, so that once the program is set up they can use it easily and don’t have to seek out the necessary information on their own.  This is also a good time to define your key performance metrics and your milestones.  Both the information for the end users and your benchmarks will help you structure your BI program.Create a Core GroupThe easiest way to get everyone in the company on board with the BI program and produce the most accurate and useful information is to designate a core group that is responsible for the program.  This group will be guide the rest of the company away from current practices and processes that lead to multiple versions of data and less than useful analytics.  Often, it is easiest for the core group to start this work in one department and gradually integrate the rest of the company.  Because at this point they know what the end users need and what their key performance metrics are, it should be simple for the core group to know where to begin their work.  These groups will also have to maintain the cleanliness, integrity, and security of the data across the company.  Understand How Data Relates to the End ApplicationThis will help the core group simplify the process as it moves forward.  By knowing which data to apply management and analytics principles to at any given time, the group can discover efficient ways to produce desired information.  Create ConsistencyIn order for your company’s business intelligence program to be successful, you’ll need to apply the same integration techniques to data, whether it is delivered from an internal or external source.  This gives your company the ability to create new relationships between data to determine new possible outcomes using your business intelligence program, without having to stop to reprocess any of the data.Once you set up your business intelligence program or revamp your existing one, your company will be poised to compete in a market where more and more industry leaders are relying on their data to back important decisions.