Building a Business Intelligence Strategy That Works
What is a Business Intelligence (BI) strategy? A BI strategy comprises a collection of tools, designs and workstreams that put data into the service of an overall business strategy. In one sense, all BI strategies are the same. As SAP noted its article, When looking into SAP’s BI and Analytics strategy, business leaders always wants a strategy that provides “people with the insights they need to make better decisions, and enable them to act.”
At the same time, no two BI strategies will ever be exactly alike. The strategy will necessarily bend to many different unique organizational, process details and strategic plans. Choosing which reporting and analytics you will need depends on the growth drivers in your industry.
If your strategy is to compete by being the low-cost producer in your industry, for example, then your BI strategy should focus on identifying cost savings across your supply chain. If your strategy is to differentiate through product features, a good BI strategy would be one that interprets market conditions and evaluates competitor offerings in real time.
Deriving value from your disparate data sources will drive revenue. What’s the best way to realize this idea? Implementing a strategy requires harnessing diverse data sources so people can create context from siloed information. In our experience, several recommended best practices emerge to facilitate BI strategic success.
In a new white paper titled, “Essential Attributes of the Modern Approach to Business Intelligence,” Infiniti Research asserts that speed – for what they call “the insight-to-decision procedure” – will be the number one quality of successful BI. Best practice BI teams will also work hard to ensure data interactivity and high UX (user experience).
If business users have practical dashboards, they may more readily embrace self-service BI reporting programs. SAP supports this requirement in their SAP BI roadmap. They include easily accessible, web-based front-ends that will look familiar to even the most tech-challenged business user.
