In the modern business landscape, more and more companies are investing in a refined business intelligence strategy. This is simple, the modern world is competitive, and businesses need to gain a competitive advantage to gain more market share. By keeping a close eye on their competitors, companies can isolate areas to step in and take over the competition. While all this seems really cool on paper, there are many technicalities involved in constantly keeping up with competitors, better yet studying them to understand where they lag. To help with this, businesses turn to big data, business analytics and of course, data science. This blog will discuss the five essential steps for creating a successful strategy and how business intelligence solutions help organizations maintain an edge over their rivals.

Let’s start with the fundamental question:

What is a BI Solution, and why do you need a strategy around it?

BI solutions are designed to analyze and report data to make informed, data-driven decisions. It’s key features include integrating multiple data sources, AI-driven data analysis, managed data access, ad-hoc reporting, and interactive visualization. A business intelligence strategy is a framework that empowers a user to solve problems related to data and helps you understand market demand through a unified and systematic approach. The process is created using business intelligence solutions and helps companies understand the different ways they can utilize their data to map their ROI.

So, what questions do you need to keep in mind when you are creating a BI strategy: 

  • Installing the software platform
  • Managing data for analysis
  • Informing customers (existing and potential)
  • Driving data for business decisions making

With an efficient business intelligence strategy, companies can acquire actionable insights such as key metrics regarding sales, performance, forecasts etc. An efficient business intelligence strategy can be broken down into three phases:

  • Discovery
  • Planning
  • Execution

What happens when you do not employ business intelligence solutions for strategy building?

If your organization does not have a strategy, you will not have a streamlined purpose or future. Even if you have a proper solution in place, you will not have clear objectives your overall goals will suffer. You will have too many opinions to look into. While each one of them will be critical to your business success, your BI solution will not be utilized because you would not have a proper strategy in place.

Now that we have discussed why a business intelligence solution and strategy is vital to an organization, let’s investigate the BI strategies that enable companies to create a suitable business plan that helps you increase revenues.

How to make an effective BI strategy in five easy steps:

1. Create a framework that represents your business plan and goals.

The framework that you create needs to be a replica of the original model and should help you create and drive strategies. With the help of a proper framework, companies can make decisions based on the data they already have and utilize it to create a transformation. The primary goals here are to secure the data and give the end-user access to it.

  • Key questions to ask when planning your business intelligence strategy framework:
  • Who will take the lead on the framework and strategy? 
  • How will the BI strategy align with your business goals?
  • How will you tabulate the results of the BI solution?
  • What solutions can be implemented? 
  • What value will they add to your company?

2. Choosing the best tools for your company’s BI Infrastructure:

Choosing the right tools for your BI infrastructure is crucial because tools can make or break a business. We can break down our business, track our approach, and eventually evolve our existing practices for better management with the right tools. In terms of BI, the following tools are the most popular in the business landscape: Tabulae, Google Data Studio, PowerBI, Looker, Mode, Periscope Data, Charito, etc.

To determine which BI tool is the best fit for your organization, you will need to do a lot of market research. You will need to investigate which features and tools you need for your business and then find tools that can meet your needs. There are some business intelligence solution providers that customize their solutions to meet the exact needs of your business and can help you create a defined strategy as well. If you have the need and budget for BI experts, then a solution provider is the way to go. However, small companies want lightweight tools and BI solutions that can carry their business needs.

3. Creating a BI guide

Your BI guide will be your roadmap towards prototyping different deliverables at several phases in the timeline. Organizations creating a business intelligence strategy and choosing BI solutions from scratch have tons of raw data at their disposal. They need to organize and map their requirements in a visual, structured manner to determine their targets and goals.

By creating a BI guide, you can segregate your tasks based on employees, teams, and your overall goals. In this way, you can easily track the team’s processes, progress, and performance and get a complete idea about your project completion rate.

4. Documenting your strategy

The reason you should actively document your business intelligence strategy is to have a point of reference. An adequately documented strategy will have sections that include the executive summary, the logic behind the solution, the project plan, objectives, goals, and requirements.

5. Review and update your BI strategy

You can regularly implement new developments, update your methods and techniques, and get better results by reviewing your BI strategy. The primary focus of the BI strategy is the return on investment. Other quantitative and qualitative metrics results include meeting deadlines, improving productivity, and adjusting priorities based on circumstances. By constantly updating your BI strategy, businesses can maximize business profits.

Final Thoughts

Business intelligence strategies are the path into the future. They allow for advanced forecasting and data-driven insights and enable companies to improve their operations constantly. Companies can prioritize market trends and respond on time to cash in on opportunities with the right business intelligence strategy.