Is BI your steering wheel or spare wheel?
It is high time to ask this one question to yourself and your team of decision makers. BI is exciting, and it is meant to propel your business in a positive direction – but are you using the power of BI to its fullest capability? Are you positively exploiting every fancy feature you paid for?
Here’s an astonishing statistic:
Only 35% enterprises effectively utilize their BI setup.
– Forrester
Have you ever measured whether your BI tool has been well worth your time and investment? Are you wondering how you can possibly measure the value that BI adds to your decision-making process? Let’s begin by asking these 5 questions:
1. How engaged are your users with your BI setup?
Active user involvement in the business intelligence ecosystem is most important when it comes to business decisions. User engagement is one of the first measures of a successful BI implementation.
If you ever felt that the user adoption rate is low in your organization, it is often due to poor user experience, slow query response times and irrelevant data reports. Steeper learning curves and lack of training are also reasons for low user engagement. While the learning curves and training issue is quickly and easily resolvable, poor user experience will ensure you remain stuck in the rut. Here is where you need to employ design thinking and UI expertise when building dashboards, reports, and the entire reporting environment.
2. Does your setup support Collaborative BI?
Being a data-driven organization is majorly about collaboration of users. The power and true value of insights and analytics are unleashed when shared and pondered upon. What do we do with the insights? Are we positioned to leverage insights and implement change?
The organizations that achieve the greatest success use the most efficient method of collaboration: in-system. Improving accessibility to the BI platform within your organization is key to better collaboration. It is imperative to share the story told by your data. To encourage collaboration, your BI initiative should encompass mobile, tablets, cross-browser availability and other various ways users in your organization access and share reports and data.
3. Is your data available, valid, and reliable?
Data management is a herculean task. Your data needs to be your single source of truth and while most companies strive to achieve this zen state, it is easier said than done – for reasons wide and varied. Right from multiple data sources, to multifarious formats of incoming data, the trudge of pulling on your legacy data store and the pressure of imbibing the value of Big Data (which might have started as a fad rather than an actual value add) – organizations struggle with a poor foundation of data accuracy like wimpy spider legs supporting a mammoth. And with burgeoning data comes the added encumbrance of reliability and searchability.
Phew! Set data management right and make your data work for you. For more assistance and a detailed one-on-one 60 min assessment – reach out to us. Book a meeting here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/tim_howard
4. What is the usage percentile of your feature-packed BI tool?
It is important to assess what you are paying for vs what you are utilizing. Often, organizations are driven to purchase all goodies in a big bundle package in hopes of achieving divine business insights. While the initiative is the right move in dollars, without the right talent to back it up, there is a good chance that your BI setup is a heavily under-utilized investment.
Most clients we speak to, have confessed guilty to unexplored features in their own BI setup – leaving out a world of possibilities undiscovered (read that as leaving revenue on the table). Get the right tech resources and get the right analysts to steer your boat, because as much as self-service is popular, a great tech team lead by a 360-degree vision is what will lay the foundation for it.
5. Is your BI aligned with your Business Outcomes?
Now this question here is the real game-changer. Here at Amtex BI we have a very common quip that often does the rounds – talking at 35000 ft.
Most clients have a high-level (35000 ft) perspective of the value that they wish to extricate from their data and analytics, but the actual execution never meets the ground reality of aligning with the expected business outcomes. Your data must work for you and the first step is to identify the gaps. Understand the friction points and elevate your analytics to efficiently support business decisions. Being a data driven business is not next-gen (more like yesterday).
What’s Next?
Take our 2 week workshop that can help you identify, fix and propel the state of analytics in your organization. VIEW (Value and Insights Exploration) is designed to help you effectively align your analytics with business goals. Try us today.
