Your Business Intelligence (BI) is not bringing you the expected results?
Beyond the potential problems of outdated technology and low adoption by your employees, these 3 signs should alert you to the need to dust off your approach.
1-Reporting and data arrive (too) late and do not provide an overview
Although decision making does not happen by the second in the context of a BI strategy, the speed of access to data and understanding them makes a difference.
If the Reporting is poorly organized or poorly organized, and the retrieval phase leaves much to be desired, the data is not only out of date (and therefore potentially quickly obsolete), but it also risks not delivering data.The comprehensible overall picture of the situation.
To mitigate this risk, it is important to generate dashboards:
- These allow you to link data to KPIs, where reporting tends to provide raw data
- Dashboards are more synthetic and visual, which makes it easier and faster to understand and make decisions.
- Important points are clearly highlighted
- They make it possible to act as a bridge between IT and decision-makers/end users.
To go further in efficiency and in “big picture” vision, injecting big data into BI can really be useful.
This point brings up another one that is often overlooked by businesses: one of the main BI issues is not identifying the key problems to be solved, nor the future needs to be anticipated. If this step is not mastered (and regularly updated), the rest of the efforts are in vain, because the consultation of the data is done blindly and without perspective.
2- The Information Systems Department (DSI) is drowning in requests for reports that become obsolete once received
Business Intelligence must facilitate the transmission of data to the right person at the right time. If the IT department sees an increase in requests for reports, there is a good chance that your BI organization is outdated and that the reports will be outdated once generated and transmitted.
Everyone does not have the same profile or the same needs within the company to make decisions adapted to their job. Reporting and dashboards must be thought of in an automated and personalized way in advance, in order to avoid the IT department overflowing with requests.
La data retrieval phase, crucial within a BI project, must take into account each profile and business need, hence the existence of datamarts.
Access to relevant data should ideally be automated, collaborative and personalized, otherwise fast and effective access to strategic business data is compromised.
3- Data is not “actionable” because it lacks context and perspective
Having a multi-channel and contextual vision of performance is fundamental for Understand what's going on and act accordingly.
The weather, competitor campaigns, the overall commercial context, the overall commercial context, historical performances, historical performances, current trends, forecasts to know, the objectives to keep in mind by period are all crucial elements for a good understanding of the data... which therefore makes them “actionable”. That being said, it is important to cross-reference and consolidate multi-source data to extract meaning: for example, Weather data may not have intrinsic value for decision-making before being put alongside data compiled in stores, on social networks or even at the online store level! Giving perspective to data also means opening doors to opportunities forpredictive analytics.
To do this, your BI strategy must be accompanied by dashboards (dashboards) personalized and precise, which contextualize the data and are oriented towards one objective: to facilitate decision-making and management by data.
As part of a BI project, the analysis/exploitation phase is fundamental from this point of view. From the reports and data obtained, the end user must be able toanalyze the information and draw the right conclusions.
This is why this phase can include datamining to highlight some correlations, but above all emphasize the choice of a good tool allowing build and consult one functional and effective dashboard.
In the end, the Relevance is key. From one department to another, from one function to another, the needs are not going to be the same.
Finally, in terms of perspective and as already mentioned earlier in this article, be able to anticipate needs Business Future of the company makes all the difference, especially when it comes to choosing a tool that can evolve with it.
Alphalyr publishes a Saas Agile Business Intelligence Solution. Each manager receives his sales report every morning with consolidated data from several sources, context data such as the weather or the competition. Its personalized and automated reporting allows it to make better decisions first thing in the morning. Our Alphy alerting system reports anomalies detected on a large number of indicators. This valuable information is essential to effectively manage the activity.
