Top 3 Best Practice Tips for Business Intelligence Success

Your company typically has multiple projects running to achieve specific outcomes to further improve your business. It may be to improve customer service experience, generate more leads, increase sales, obtain more loyal customers and so on. A Business Intelligence initiative is also a business project; one that requires considerable effort and key resources for it to perform successfully for your organisation.

In this blog, we look at the top three best practice tips for Business Intelligence success.

1: Ensure stakeholders are involved from start to finish

This sounds like a given for any business, right? Well, according to a study conducted by Forrester Research, this, astonishingly, isn’t always the case! The research found that some Business Intelligence projects failed in the early stages and some were even signed off and delivered before someone in the company realised that they didn’t meet expectations.

What is the common reason for these failures? Lack of communication! These initiatives did not run smoothly due to the lack of involvement of the company's executive level staff members and/or subject matter experts throughout the whole the process. The main take away is to ensure that those that need to be involved in the BI project in your company are involved from the beginning through to the end.

As stated in our recent blog article, “Business Intelligence in Australia: A Snapshot”, technology is not the only component of Business Intelligence. The success of a BI project comes down to the organisation as a whole absorbing the policies and processes of intelligent decision-making.

2: Review, optimise, repeat

What gets measured gets managed. You may have the best plans and support for your Business Intelligence initiative, but if you are not regularly monitoring its performance then how do you expect your business to improve operational efficiency and gain competitive advantage?

Be agile. Work collaboratively with the relevant staff members in your company, break all of the elements of a project down into smaller chunks and review each phase on a regular basis in order to ensure your BI initiative is performing at optimum level.

3: Implement a clear governance structure

Successful Business Intelligence requires good governance. Two main features are governance of the Business Intelligence deployment and data governance.

Governance of the Business Intelligence deployment

All the stakeholders involved must, first and foremost, have a clear understanding of the objectives set, the strategy to follow, the priorities and the resources to be used in the BI implementation. In addition, everyone involved must have clarity on the roles they play in the implementation. It is also important to establish who will make the decisions and at what levels.

By having the above clearly defined, you can ensure your Business Intelligence initiative will be implemented according to plan and within the agreed timeframe.

Data governance

Develop a clear process for data storage and management. Make sure you are aware of all data owned by the organisation, regardless of whether it is stored internally or externally. Determine the value of this data for decision making, process improvement and development of new products and/or services and so on.

You also need to know what rules apply, internally and externally, to the capture of this data.

As we move further into a technology-driven age, it is evident that what will differentiate you from your competitor is how you use your data as well as the quality of data you have.

Keep to these three best practice tips and you’ll find they will assist in your successful BI implementation and ultimately help your organisation make better strategic decisions, efficiently and effectively.