Business Intelligence Implementation: A Step-By-Step Strategy Execution

The current level of technological development is shifting the traditional ways of doing business and managing a company. Even small organizations take a deep approach to collecting data about customers and their preferences. Business intelligence (BI) enables users to draw conclusions from data analysis. Specialists process and analyze data and study its specifics through advanced use of statistics and predictive analytics. This allows for identifying patterns and predicting future patterns.

Regular business intelligence has been a priority and a competitive edge for companies for a long period. BI implementation converts raw data into valuable information. This solution helps to prioritize and make reasonable decisions. It is the most balanced instrument to effectively manage a business, but the beginning of such a complex process requires preparation, and NIX can help you in this matter. This article assists in organizing business operations, so let’s talk more about strategy realization.

The Significance of Business Intelligence and Strategy Application

A business intelligence strategy realizes planned decisions about how your information is used. To create a solid plan, you should identify three important aspects—How are you planning to roll out the platform, how will you operate data flows, and how will data-driven solutions be made? The success of the realization is possible due to systematic actions by applying the appropriate BI implementation strategy.

Many entrepreneurs underestimate the worth of data and analytics because they don’t know the benefits it can provide. But you need to implement this technology so that your company increases profitability, has a long-term stable advantage, and accelerates overall business growth. You also get the following changes:

You can execute BI without a strategy, but you won’t comprehend the structure, all graphs and information will be of no value, and your team will not understand the reasons for their use. Let’s take a closer look at the main elements of a business intelligence implementation plan.

• How do you imagine the company’s development, and how will BI assist you in reaching your goals?
• Who will implement the strategy and how?
• What information solutions do you need to create, and for which departments?

These answers determine the development plan so you have an understanding of what initiatives need to be implemented. It gives an understanding of which specialists execute and maintain the processes. And, finally, it’s time to build a business intelligence implementation strategy.

Steps to Perform Business Intelligence

The enterprises’ results bring the efficiency of BI systems and increase revenue through data-driven decisions. Businesses of all sizes face intense competition and narrow profit margins. However, there is a case study of business analytics that proves that building a smart strategy based on data shows the best results.

Business intelligence implementation is a multi-stage process with a detailed consideration of each task and the creation of solutions for each one.

1. Strategy Creation

All multi-stage processes require careful planning. Without a coherent strategy, companies rely on conflicting information and stick to unreliable plans that come up on the fly. In the process, contradictory guesses are built, which devalues the data and its impact.

In priority order, a list of up-to-date data and those responsible for their storage is created. Next, the secondary data and the systems that will provide them are determined.

The formation of a BI implementation plan is based on three main aspects that you could answer earlier. This step is characterized by structuring the goals. You create the vision of how and where you will apply the data. Do you want to lower the margin? Do you want to attract more customers? Do you need to make smart use of the budget? Our team prioritizes effective ways to achieve goals.

Determine the type of your BI system. What functions will it perform? Will it completely replace your existing system? What platform will be the basis? Will it be a ready-made service or a custom solution?

Our experts explore these important questions with your company to understand the development trajectory. Only after that, you consider the innards of projects and can purposefully improve them.

2. Define KPI

Modern software offers a lot of different indicators and indices that track the efficiency and status of workflows. Our experts study business processes as a whole and help to identify the weakest sides. To facilitate the selection of indicators, our team divides them into categories: project control, marketing indicators, finance, client data and HR. Our team also distributes the use of KPIs common to the entire company and departments.

3. Budget Calculation

After identifying the starting point and determining the main goals, our specialists define the budget. This is a key step in building a successful BI strategy. Budgeting wisely allocates resources.

The market is saturated with many solutions that offer a wide range of features for efficient data usage. Their cost varies and depends on the company’s size and its requirements. Therefore, a case study of a clear understanding of the company’s demands and the general budget will allow you to allocate the right amount, taking into account all the requirements.

4. Software and Tools Selection

An important point in the BI implementation steps is to discover suitable software for each objective. Projects of all sizes claim specialized knowledge and rarely succeed on their own. Therefore, the use of our services is a wise approach with an independent assessment of the company.

The market is filled with a large volume of business intelligence toolkits, so functional and non-functional demands are taken into account when targeting them. The main choice is influenced by the method of accessing data, the use of metrics, etc.

Our experts determine the complexity of the analysis, and if it is at an average level, then ready-made solutions will not be enough. It is imperative to properly assess business requirements. Ready-made solutions may not solve your problems, but you should not use a lot of additional functions, as they will be redundant for your business and you will not use them.

At first, ready-made tools can be cheaper than investing in the acquisition of specialized software. But in the long run, they can cost you more due to the possible rise in the purchase of subscriptions and maintenance. Therefore, you need to purchase custom tools for deep-scale BI analytics.

5. Choose Your BI Platform

The next stage in business intelligence implementation is to select an environment and a suitable platform. The choice lies between local, cloud, or hybrid data hosting. To understand the differences between these environments, it is best to compare them.

Local environment. The infrastructure is installed in physical places, locally, for full control. This model is suitable for businesses who make a clear decision to store locally and are wary of maintaining privacy and security.

Cloud model. Access and work with data are controlled by independent providers in a cloud structure. The significant advantage is that there are no costs for the purchase and maintenance of physical equipment. Companies are often afraid to use the cloud because of the perception that it is insecure. But in fact, the cloud is more secure than a local platform, as it all depends on the correct infrastructure implementation.

Cloud service providers are aware of the challenges of traditional business migration and their concerns. Therefore, they protect data with the help of special technologies, and the privacy issue is of paramount importance.

Hybrid cloud. This combines local hardware with cloud services. This option is suitable for enterprises with the need to store critical information and workloads on physical hardware and non-essential resources in the environment.

The market leaders are cloud platforms with a percentage of consumer usage:

6. Creating a Roadmap

When executing a BI implementation project plan, the roadmap is an infographic that indicates planned work activities by date, KPI, deliverables, and milestones over time.

At this stage, you have at your disposal all the necessary data to organize the process. Now you need to set deadlines and desired results for each task. It should contain technical information and be easy to understand. The BI implementation roadmap can be focused on high-ranking tasks, such as finding software, or can be narrowed down to the least important metrics. But for BI realization comparisons, a simple overview will suffice.

Consider timeline and dependencies, and monitor and make changes along the process. The roadmap must be ready for adaptation at any time. BI is useful in the active state. If the strategy is only focused on responding to ad hoc reporting requests, then business intelligence will not work to its full potential. Adjust the roadmap and add new events, changes in the market, or client behavior.

7. Data Preparation

Before implementing a BI system, you need to synchronize data, as departments use various approaches, technologies, tools, etc. After data integrity is achieved, additional data quality parameters are evaluated. Our experts conduct a case study and consider the fullness, sequence, relevance, uniqueness, and accuracy of data.

8. Create a Pilot Project

This is a short-term proof of concept project. With its help, hypotheses are checked, variations in the simplification of functions appear, and project functionality is tested. This stage shows the business intelligence implementation readiness. It also facilitates the search for original data and the changes’ introduction to improving the data sets’ security.

9. Solid Implementation of BI

After making the necessary adjustments, the compliance of the result with the initial business intelligence implementation steps is assessed. Whether the results meet the original queries and your goals. If the final version does not provide a solution to all problems, then our specialists introduce new changes that correspond to the KPI. Then the project is tested again. It is a continuous procedure that is carried out regularly to optimize problematic aspects. Once the results reach the desired point, it is safe to scale.

Business intelligence is a mandatory technique that provides a company with important information about the state of its work. It deeply reveals internal workflows, evaluates performance, processes efficiency, and ways of attracting customers, identifies weaknesses and shortcomings, and adjusts the business strategy.

10. Consider Your BI Strategy Annually

Have you determined how you will gauge the success of your BI implementation? The result of quantitative indicators is not enough to understand what progress is happening in your company’s development and how much better you know the business.

You should review the BI model to comprehend the direction of movement and whether it is possible to follow the correct direction. Prioritize ROI to assess payback.

It is also worth measuring the productivity of the BI management team, assessing whether all goals have been achieved, and reviewing priorities.

Required Functionality for Business Intelligence

To achieve successful implementation of business intelligence, you need to utilize the inherent BI features to make quick decisions and streamline workflows.

Data integration. BI software must be customizable, allowing for seamless delivery and integration to create a secure repository.

BI panel. This includes an advanced response toolkit for displaying KPIs through built-in, easy-to-understand information visualization.

Predictive analytics. This is the traditional way of making decisions by checking previous data. From this information, analysts determine future events.

Specialized analytics. This format is used to answer specific questions. The analysis provides a case study as instant and detailed information regarding specific processes and short-term solutions. Also, this tool drills down into the statistical report for more information about a specific process or sub-operation.

Online analytical processing. Retrieves and queries specific data to analyze it from various angles. This is used for trend analysis, sales forecasting, and financial reporting.

BI in real-time. This technique provides the most up-to-date data, ensures access to operating systems, and enters information into a repository or BI system in real-time.

Conclusion

This strategy leads to the fulfillment of high-level aims and turns them into concrete results due to the use of an appropriate roadmap. Business intelligence implementation maximizes the investment’s value and avoids the trap that can lead to resource waste.

Each business has its specifics, but the strategy is flexibly adapted to the company’s requirements. With an experienced team, your business will achieve meaningful results. Contact us if you need consultation on BI implementation.