Blog post

How to improve your business intelligence strategy

By Kit Germeroth

A strong business intelligence (BI) strategy can make all the difference when it comes to how your organization grows and adapts. Instead of making reactive decisions in response to industry change, BI enables you to use data to make smarter decisions and stay ahead of competitors.

A BI strategy involves more than just choosing tools and technology. You also need to consider how you’ll implement the tools, how your processes will change, and how to make these new processes sustainable and successful. This is where a BI roadmap comes in handy. 

A BI roadmap is a strategic guide that covers how your organization should structure technologies and processes to tackle current challenges and achieve overall business objectives. It provides an overview and guideline of how to implement the most effective solution(s) to reach your specific goals.

Why define a BI roadmap?

A lot of organizations have a wealth of data that could be used to generate real business value. But actually enabling people in the organization to naturally use insights from data to make decisions isn’t so straightforward.

Efforts to become data-driven don’t reach their true potential or fail for a number of reasons. It could be that only one part of the organization is driving the effort, the cultural change is overlooked, the right governance structure isn’t put in place, or the wrong technology is used. In other words, the problem isn’t well-defined and the solution isn’t comprehensive enough.

A structured BI roadmap defines the comprehensive organizational changes that are necessary, and it kick-starts your journey by highlighting which analytics projects to tackle first. We define these two things as the necessary foundations to put in place to achieve goals and deliver the expected value.

The analytics roadmap also defines the highest value projects to kickstart the journey to becoming a data-driven enterprise. Together, they help you make sense of the ever-changing analytics landscape and how you can best organize yourself to get the most out of your data.

The results of a BI roadmap

When our team sets out to create a BI roadmap for a client, our approach is always tailored to each specific engagement, acknowledging that each organization is different; we customize the scope and focus to fit your business objectives. By doing so, we’ve helped our clients create real business value.

For example, we’ve helped one of our clients transition toward a data-driven enterprise by defining the entire organizational structure and analytics roadmap. After a transition period, the organization has now taken over the analytics responsibilities and has its own BI Center of Excellence.

For other clients, we’ve created a BI roadmap to help them identify which technologies are best for their specific needs, and how they can properly govern the new solutions to create real business value. The BI roadmap is a versatile, comprehensive, and powerful approach to kick-start your implementation and align it to business objectives.