Is Business Intelligence Driving Your Organization’s Mission?

Business intelligence provides a way to increase profit and interpret data effectively, but an improper implementation can significantly reduce its effectiveness. Determining how effective your processes are, and whether or not business intelligence is actually driving your mission, can improve operations performance by a significant degree. Here’s how.

The Map to Success

At every stage of operations, you should have a clear strategy for what to do and when to do it. A focus on business information helps ensure that you are asking the right questions while making your strategy, including:

• What information do we need to run the business?
• Do our reports tell us the information we need in an effective manner?
• Is this information something we can actually use?

A collection of information that covers trends, ideas, demographics, and other information is only relevant and useful once something can be done with it. Prior to this stage, the information is effectively useless. For this reason, all collected data should have a clear and obvious explanation of its use placed in an appropriate location, along with a brief summary and/or recommendation based on the results of the data.

Support for the Program

Due to its nature as a typically technology-heavy strategy, it is very common to think of business intelligence as something for the IT department to handle. This assumption is wrong. While the technological component is a significant aspect, the project is also a business decision. The employees working on business intelligence must have clear lines of communication with the upper levels of management so they know what to look for and how to report it once they’ve found it. Simply aggregating information together and pulling statistics out of it is a relatively simple task for modern software. However, supplying IT with questions to have answered, and full support for both finding the answers and implementing strategies is crucial to the success of the overall program. Business intelligence has the capacity to be a major factor in making decisions and should be regarded as such by managers and executives.

Allowing for Flexibility

Any initiative for business intelligence should be flexible enough to be modified based on changing information and situations. It should not require a significant amount of extra effort to take the answers from one question and ask another question that can help predict trends and determine strategies. The need for flexibility extends to both sides, since the rest of the business should be flexible enough to put new plans and ideas into practice. Information that cannot be utilized is effectively worthless, but information that can be acted upon is one of the most valuable possessions a company has. If your organization is being appropriately driven by business intelligence, you will be able to make full use of whatever information you receive. The end result of this flexibility is increased profits, greater competitiveness, more satisfied customers, and a reputation as a company that does things right. Each of these is a valuable goal in its own right, but few situations have as much ability to assist in all of them at once as the application of intelligence in a way that effectively drives your company forward.

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