The technological advancements of the digital age have completely changed the global business community. Companies all around the world have got large amounts of data about market, demand, and customer experience at their disposal. But do these businesses actually realize what they own?
The reality is that most of the time, important and factual data ends up buried beneath tons of unnecessary and excessive information, making it challenging for companies to manage and leverage all the data they collect. This prevents companies from effectively using the data they have. In fact, only 12% of companies analyze the data they receive.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at how Business Intelligence (BI) can help companies be more efficient when dealing with their data. We will also review the main aspects of BI implementation and basic business intelligence implementation steps.
Introduction to Business Intelligence
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of transforming raw data into meaningful and actionable insights that drive business success. By collecting, analyzing, and interpreting complex data, organizations can make informed decisions that support their strategic goals. BI leverages a combination of tools, technologies, and methodologies to help companies unlock the full potential of their data, enabling smarter decision making and a stronger competitive position in the market.
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence encompasses a wide range of activities designed to help organizations make sense of their data. This includes data mining to uncover hidden patterns, data analysis to interpret trends, and data visualization to present information in a clear and accessible way. BI tools such as data warehouses, online analytical processing (OLAP) systems, and advanced data visualization software play a crucial role in supporting decision making at every level of the organization. By integrating these technologies, companies can efficiently analyze large volumes of data, identify opportunities, and support decision making with confidence.
The Importance of BI in Modern Organizations
In today’s rapidly evolving business environment, the ability to harness data for strategic advantage is more important than ever. Successful BI implementation empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions, quickly respond to market trends, and optimize internal processes for greater operational efficiency. By leveraging BI solutions, companies can reduce costs, improve resource allocation, and increase revenue. Ultimately, a well-executed BI implementation helps organizations stay agile, competitive, and prepared for the challenges of a data-driven world.
Why Does Your Company Need Business Intelligence Implementation?
When it comes to the concept of business intelligence, we should picture not just the mere technology but a set of tools, software, and practices used for the collection and presentation of the company’s data.
BI systems consolidate different sources of data into a single information stream. This is all done in a way to allow decision-makers to easily analyze and manage information.
Business intelligence helps companies move from ‘guessing’ to ‘understanding’ the real cause of a particular problem. Here’s a simple example:
The “traditional” business approach:
Problem → “Sales are below target this quarter”
Reason → “Because Sales team productivity is low”.
The BI-induced approach:
Problem → “Sales are below target this quarter”
Reason → “Because of drop in sales in ABC period(s)” → “Because of unusual number of customer complaints” → “Because of major shipping delays” → “Because of the supply chain issues that take place due to XYZ”.
The importance of business intelligence becomes evident if we look at the fact that today’s global datasphere is growing exponentially and will reach 175 ZB by 2025 (175 x 10²¹ bytes) — compared to 45 ZB generated in 2019. According to statistics, 2 QB (2 x 1018) of data are generated across all industries every day.
Data needs to be organized somehow, and it’s no secret that legacy systems and outdated infrastructures are no longer able to aggregate such large chunks of incoming information. In such environments, data silos often form, creating barriers to effective collaboration and data integration. On the contrary, BI systems can help structure end-to-end workflow — from data collection to preparation to interpretation and storage — and break down these data silos to enable better data integration and collaboration.
To put this all into perspective, the implementation of business intelligence can be beneficial for:
- Turning static data into actionable insights. The ability to extract crucial facts from operational data and quickly adjust strategies is what really differentiates a successful business from others. The implementation of BI allows businesses to discover profitable and low-yield activities and helps to identify what keeps a business from achieving its plans and goals set.
- Identifying ways to increase profit. BI turns cumbersome data tables into interactive dashboards, giving non-tech savvy users a proper perspective and a unified picture of what needs to be done in particular to move from point A `Where are we now?` to point B `Where do we want to be?`.
- Tracking business performance. BI helps to ensure you get the right information to track, identify the correct KPIs, and — most importantly — use the right means to measure relevant indicators.
- Optimizing operations. Thanks to business intelligence tools, disparate sources of information can be put together and give business owners a holistic view of their operations. This will help to further develop existing infrastructure, or improve areas of weakness that often cause businesses to lose clients.
- Analyzing customer behavior. Thorough analysis of user patterns provides businesses with important insights into customer’s habits and motivation. BI brings forth a real and unbiased picture of how customers interact with a company’s products or services, what problems they face, what makes them abandon carts or switch to a competitor’s product, etc.
- Getting a competitive advantage. Business intelligence promotes faster and smarter decision-making, helping a business achieve its short- and long-term goals faster. BI also highlights new sales opportunities, putting a company one step ahead of the competition.
- Trends discovery. Without access to relevant data, it is almost impossible to discover emerging trends and figure out rapidly changing market conditions. Introducing interactive BI tools to the daily operations, business owners can quickly spot changes in demand, market capacity, investment environment, etc.
All these aspects that come with business intelligence systems are extremely important for the fast-paced environments businesses are faced with today. That brings us to the next question of how to implement business intelligence
Successful Business Intelligence Implementation Steps
1. Analyze the current state of the company’s data
Before implementing a BI strategy or integrating corresponding tools, it’s necessary to understand in which state your data is, currently. This process includes identifying and documenting all relevant data sources as a foundational step. Examining these data sources and evaluating how data is stored, managed, and shared is essential. Data extraction from these sources is a crucial part of preparing for BI implementation, as it enables seamless integration and standardization of information.
Keep in mind that not all sources can be valuable for BI — some may provide incomplete data, some duplicate information, overlap stats, etc. So, select those that are clear and carry the most value in terms of information relevance and retrieval, ensuring the quality and reliability of extracted data for effective analysis.
2. Gather a team of subject matter experts
Obviously, the BI integration process would be impossible to carry out without a dedicated team. Your team has to consist of data-driven experts that have expertise in different domains — finance, IT, marketing, HR, etc. These can come from your various intercompany departments. It is also crucial to involve key stakeholders from across the organization to ensure the BI project aligns with overall business needs and objectives.
A mix of members with different backgrounds ensures that the BI team will be able to introduce changes to all the necessary areas of your company and not overfocus on a single component.
When it comes to the team members’ roles, in particular, your group of BI evangelists may consist of: Data Quality Analyst, Data Mining Expert, Lead Developer, Infrastructure Architect, Data Administrator, Project Manager, and Business Representative.
3. Create a strategy and a business intelligence implementation plan
Once you have assembled a BI team, it’s time to develop your business intelligence strategy. It is essential to ensure that this strategy aligns with your overall business goals, so that BI initiatives directly support your organization’s objectives. Begin by evaluating and selecting the most appropriate BI solution for your organization’s needs, considering factors such as scalability, integration, and user requirements.
Planning for BI adoption is crucial—develop strategies to encourage user adoption across the organization to maximize the value of your BI tools. To ensure a successful implementation, follow a structured development process that includes requirements gathering and stakeholder interviews. This approach will help you correctly define the scope of business intelligence implementation and address key organizational priorities.
Getting answers to those questions beforehand will help to lay out a clear road map for successful BI implementation.
Getting answers to those questions beforehand will help to lay out a clear road map for successful BI implementation.
4. Identify important KPIs
At this stage, you need to understand what you want to measure. Identifying key performance indicators will help you ensure your BI strategy stays on the right track throughout the whole business intelligence implementation process.
The choice of metrics solely depends on your goals, but we advise you to break them into sections based on the objectives (or departments) they relate to. For example:
- Finances — Current Ratio, Accounts Receivable Turnover Ratio, Net Profit Margin.
- Sales — Sales Revenue, Gross Sales Revenue.
- Marketing — Marketing Qualified Leads, Conversion Rate, Customer Acquisition Cost.
- Human Resources — Revenue per Employee, Cost per Hire, Early Turnover.
- Project Management — Productivity, Return On Investments, Actual Cost.
If you are just starting to work with business intelligence, we recommend concentrating on the most important KPIs first in order not to overcomplicate the data gathering and analysis processes. Focus on valuable data that directly supports your business objectives and informs decision-making.
5. Educate Staff & Stakeholders
For many people, it is quite difficult to break established habits, and business intelligence adoption is no exception here. If your employees have never had experience working with the BI before, chances are they will resist adopting new tools.
To make sure that your staff understands the necessity of change, hold training sessions and make them a part of the implementation strategy. Help employees see the bigger picture and value behind the new software; explain how new tools will improve their work and what the reasons are for introducing such changes. Data analytics has to become a part of a company’s culture. Fostering a data driven culture and encouraging a data driven mindset are essential for successful BI adoption, as they help employees embrace data-centric thinking and support organizational alignment.
Oftentimes, all business owners have to do to minimize the effect of this phenomenon is simply communicate with their employees to get their input (before actually implementing BI tools). When people — whose work will be affected by the changes — know their considerations are taken into account, and that their concerns are addressed in advance, it is much easier for them to start using new technologies.
6. Choose a software and setup BI infrastructure
The integration of actual BI tools will be a major part of the whole process. At this stage, you will need to choose your BI software. It is important to select BI tools that can seamlessly integrate with ERP systems, ensuring smooth data flow across your business operations. Power BI stands out as a leading BI tool, offering robust self-service capabilities, advanced data integration, and machine learning features, making it a strong choice for many organizations. Luckily, there are a lot of ready-made solutions on the market from SAP, IBM, Oracle, Tableau, and Power BI.
Building a comprehensive BI ecosystem involves integrating various tools, data sources, and processes to support all business intelligence activities. Your developers, in turn, will need to configure data storage and data environment components, which is a key part of the software development and development process. This includes requirements gathering, stakeholder interviews, and team formation to ensure the BI infrastructure meets your business needs.
For data storage, you can go with either of two repositories: a data lake or data warehouse. A data lake assumes storing raw blocks of data, the purpose of which is yet to be defined. A data warehouse, on the other hand, is a repository that stores structured and filtered data. The latter is considered a better choice for BI architecture.
The integration phase is a critical step in setting up the BI system, involving technical setup, resource allocation, and close collaboration with IT teams to configure tools and data architecture. For the data environment, you can choose between three options: On-premise — where the BI system is located on your internal physical servers; Cloud — where the BI system is stored in a public/private cloud; and Hybrid — where some components are stored internally, and some are deployed in the cloud.
Adopting innovative solutions, such as leveraging artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, can further enhance your BI capabilities and help maintain a competitive edge.
If you don’t have enough expertise in the Big Data domain, you can always onboard a ready-made development team who has the relevant know-how and is experienced enough in developing custom business intelligence systems tailored to your needs.
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7. Roll out pilot project and adjust system based on the results
After all the components of a system are tuned to work together, it’s time to test them. As part of ongoing BI projects, begin with smaller chunks of data and expand later on as you adjust system requirements, always aiming for successful implementation. The testing process of a BI system normally covers all main reporting functions and consists of several phases:
- Functional testing — report data accuracy checks, drill-down checks, report performance checks, browser checks.
- ADHOC report testing — mapping checks.
- Security testing — report access tests, data security checks, integrated security tests.
- Regression testing — regression testing of report data, report data format, report performance, and report security.
- Stress testing — simulating concurrent user load and user behavior.
A BI system should be viewed as a strategic asset that drives long-term organizational success by enhancing innovation, operational efficiency, and competitive advantage.
Once all of these tests are done, you should run your customizable system to get results across your KPIs. This is an ongoing process so, after introducing changes to the areas of your audit, run the system again to see the changes in key performance indicators. After that, you can scale — adding more data and more detailed KPIs.
Maintaining a Competitive Edge with Business Intelligence
To maintain a competitive edge, organizations must use business intelligence to gain deeper insights into their operations, customers, and the broader market. This requires a robust BI strategy that aligns with business objectives and fosters a culture of data driven decision making. By integrating BI into their core processes, companies can anticipate market trends, adapt to changing conditions, and make decisions that support long-term business success.
Leveraging BI to Stay Ahead in Your Industry
Staying ahead in your industry means making the most of your data assets through effective business intelligence practices. Organizations can leverage BI by focusing on key strategies such as data integration, advanced data analysis, and compelling data visualization. Utilizing BI tools and technologies allows companies to extract valuable insights from large datasets, spot emerging trends, and create interactive dashboards that support decision making at every level.
Implementing BI with WTT Solutions
All great strategies and innovations come from data-driven decisions, and BI is a way to ensure companies have solid ground to base their actions on. A business intelligence solution helps organizations with turning raw data into actionable insights, supports comprehensive data management, and provides access to real-time analytics without relying on third-party companies.
Implementing a BI solution involves analyzing raw data as a key step in the process, ensuring data quality and usability for effective decision-making. Data science further enhances BI solutions by adding advanced analytics capabilities, enabling organizations to leverage complex data architectures and sophisticated insights. Predictive analytics and predictive analysis allow companies to forecast trends and simulate scenarios, supporting strategic planning. Additionally, multidimensional analysis offers deeper insights into business performance by enabling flexible examination of data across multiple dimensions.
The popularity of business intelligence is spreading at high speed, and will continue to do so as more and more data becomes generated worldwide.
If you are interested in developing a custom business intelligence application, or want to get a deeper sense of what’s going on and what should be done with your company data, contact us through the feedback form in the upper right corner of this page. Make sure you subscribe to our newsletter so you don’t miss any new blogs and industry insights!