The power of business intelligence tools and technologies (BI) to provide managers and leaders accurate, real time visibility to the performance of all aspects of their companies – marketing, sales, operational financial – along with “automated” insight as to how to improve them has made BI one of the highest ROI arenas of business management in the world today.
This is evidenced by both the huge sums of money companies are investing in BI (forecast by IDC to grow to over $52B in 2016) and by the research that show “BI Best in Class” companies enjoy double the revenue growth and triple the profit growth relative to their “BI Average” competitors (Gartner Group).
Yet…for the executive looking to put the power of BI to work in their companies it can be a very noisy and confusing (see terms like predictive analytics, Internet of Things, Hadoop, Executive Management Platforms, etc.) buying marketplace to navigate.
So here is a short-hand primer on how to start putting BI to work in any company in just a few short days…I call it being BI H.A.P.P.Y and it goes like this:
High ROI is Everything. When it comes to BI, the first place to look is at it should be – cutting through all the noise and clutter and asking any BI provider a simple question: Show me how your tools will generate high ROI and make my business money right away.
This should of course be the first question asked for any business investment, but especially so in a burgeoning arena like BI, where a lot of the providers are new companies themselves and when you cut through their marketing veneers don’t really have documented proof for their stated value propositions.
Press them on it, and if they just keep coming back with platitudes versus ROI proof then move on.
Agnostic is Best. A key distinction when it comes to BI tools and approaches is whether they are agnostic / open-source or closed / focused on a specific business process / industry application.
My strong recommendation is at this early BI juncture is to take the agnostic / open-source approach, because no matter what BI tool one chooses, in just a few months there will be a next generation option that will be cleaner (i.e. less riddled with bugs), probably less expensive, and more naturally business intuitive than the current crop.
This does not mean that one should wait to get started until these next generation tools arrive, only that the systems and platforms that one commits to now should be easy to upgrade / port over to / connect with the next generation systems as they become available.
As importantly, agnostic / open-source BI systems also allow for a standardized, company-wide “Manage by Data” look and feel unavailable in industry / process specific systems.
The Best BI is Prescriptive AND Predictive. BI at its best should be both Prescriptive – interpreting for us the meaning and importance of historical results and how to improve them and Predictive –performing the regression analyses for us as to what the future is mostly like to hold.
Is the technology to do this fully there yet? No, but it is getting close, and the smart executive recognizes the value of building these prescriptive and predictive BI muscles now because when the technology does gets there, the companies that can’t run this “analytics race” will be lapped by those that can.
DFY. A fundamental BI dimension is the Done-For-You (DFY) to Do-It-Yourself (DIY) spectrum.
While it is important to develop strong DIY BI competencies, we also should recognize that because BI tools and technologies are so new and because so much of the value of them is found “On the Margin,” that working with a BI skills-specific service provider is almost always a necessary best practice.
A skilled BI service provider helps us:
- Decide which BI analytics and dashboard tools and technologies are most appropriate for our business
- Finds the data in our organizations – on our desktops, in our spreadsheets, and through the various SaaS programs and platforms on which our companies run
- Visualize and parse the data in ways that work for us as managers and leaders
- Interpret what the data means and what to do about it
- Make sure that all of the above doesn’t “break” and that the “BI muscles” within our organization are built and remain strong
So again,
H is for High ROI
A is for Agnostic / Open-Sourced
P is for Prescriptive
P is for Predictive
Y is for DFY (Done-for-You)
Follow this simple meme and watch the results from your BI Investments and for your company soar.
Read more: http://www.growthink.com/content/happy-business-intelligence#ixzz3k3AibSPf
