Important factors to note while designing a business intelligence programme for your brand

With digital transformation accelerating faster than ever in the corporate landscape, most organizations now use a combination of business tools to conduct their operations across sales, marketing, finance, HR, and so on.

All of these tools, more often than not, have a reporting module that shows department-specific data records and statements.

However, isolated data such as sales figures, lead numbers, email open rates, and so on may only tell you so much about customer behavior.

As businesses continue to go digital and become more data-driven, it is critical that they include a comprehensive business intelligence (BI) program in their technology strategy.

A comprehensive BI program enables the combination of various data points from multiple sources, cross-functional analysis, and the generation of intuitive insights such as the inspirations behind seasonal customer trends, the reasons for supply-chain gaps, sales funnel pain points gleaned from customer feedback, productivity drops due to employee attrition, future trend predictions, and so on. This type of powerful information can help organizations establish a culture of smart, evidence-based decision-making and acquire a true competitive advantage.

Starting a company analytics and intelligence program

If your organization has the funds and resources to create a central BI platform, the first logical step is to determine the essential business indicators you want to compute and track.

As previously said, once you’ve determined your goals, the following stage is to develop a data strategy. You must first define your data strategy for key emphasis areas before identifying and aligning its data sources with that strategy. From there, the organization should be able to easily construct a data pipeline and prepare the data for analysis.

Constructing a strong, unified data pipeline from heterogeneous sources

One of the most difficult issues that organizations encounter while executing their BI program is preparing the data pipeline. Using a mixed toolset provided by many suppliers results in diverse data sets that must first be merged, blended, and homogenized in order to enable a(n) smoother and more accurate analytical technique.

In fact, it has been reported that data preparation consumes up to 80% of analysis time, as low quality data frequently leads in untrustworthy business insights.

This is when BI solutions with data preparation features come in handy. Whether it’s a custom-built BI program or a bespoke tool, it’s critical that your choice includes data-prepping and blending capabilities, such as the ability to connect to various sources (legacy or cloud app) and port data in different formats, clean and remove duplicates, blend the data into a single data warehouse, and improve overall data quality. This contributes to dependable business intelligence by ensuring strong, error-free data pipelines.

Bringing your privacy practices and formal policy up to date

With a BI program, your company’s commitment to protect consumer data grows. Some privacy practices to consider include: (1) masking critical user data, i.e., removing personally identifiable information from all data sets using anonymization methods before feeding them into the BI data pipeline; (2) collecting explicit consent from data subjects (customers and employees) to use their anonymized data for BI analysis; (3) ensuring that your data sources are also subject to stringent privacy standards; and (4) updating your organization.

Integrating your Business Intelligence(BI) program with internal collaboration platforms

Despite the expense of implementing a full BI program, many organizations struggle to promote adoption throughout their teams and prompt essential action or decision-making. One solution is to connect the BI system broadly and thoroughly across internal communication and collaboration platforms used by employees, including email, chat, intranet forums, project management channels, and so forth. The BI dashboards must enable executives to blend and graphically analyze data for cross-functional insights, turn the insights into clearly intelligible and interactive reports, decide on the next course of action, and then disseminate the information in real-time with the teams or individuals involved.

Staying ahead of the curve – make room for innovation

Running a future-ready firm is being continually on the lookout for innovation and ensuring that your systems and processes are elastic enough to absorb change as you integrate current technologies and enhance operational efficiencies. Similarly, your BI software should allow you to experiment with and capitalize on future opportunities such as AI-powered voice analytics and RPA/business analytics integration. For example, current AI developments have enabled users to converse with AI assistants in order to generate automatic BI insights with a single click, anticipate future trends, perform as well as visualize cognitive and what-if studies, and much more.

If the past two years have taught us anything, it’s that things may change quite quickly, and it’s critical to remain adaptable. Cloud-based BI technologies allow corporate owners to view real-time data from multiple departments. to make hasty decisions This enables organizations to remain agile amid unusual times.