What BI metrics and KPIs do you use to evaluate your impact?

1 BI Metrics

BI metrics are quantitative measures that track and evaluate the performance, quality, and efficiency of your BI processes, systems, and outputs. They help you measure your BI activities, identify issues and gaps, and demonstrate your BI value proposition. For instance, data quality metrics can assess how accurate, complete, consistent, and timely your data is. Data governance metrics can gauge how well you manage, secure, and document your data assets and policies. Data usage metrics can determine how often, by whom, and for what purpose your data is accessed and consumed. Data delivery metrics can evaluate how fast, reliable, and user-friendly your data pipelines, platforms, and tools are. And data literacy metrics can measure how proficient your data consumers are in understanding, analyzing, and communicating with data.

2 BI KPIs

BI KPIs are strategic measures that align your BI objectives with your organizational goals and priorities. These key performance indicators help you assess and communicate the impact and value of your BI solutions on core business outcomes such as revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction, innovation, and growth. For example, you can measure return on investment (ROI), customer lifetime value (CLV), net promoter score (NPS), employee engagement, and innovation rate. ROI compares the benefit of BI investments with their costs, CLV reveals the expected revenue from each customer, NPS measures how likely customers are to recommend your products or services, employee engagement evaluates satisfaction and productivity levels of employees, and innovation rate tracks the number of new products, services, or features launched or improved.

3 How to Choose BI Metrics and KPIs

Choosing the right BI metrics and KPIs depends on several factors, such as your BI vision, scope, stakeholders, and resources. To ensure you select the most relevant and meaningful ones for your situation, you should align them with your BI strategy and goals, making them SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound). Additionally, you must balance the trade-offs and interdependencies between them. Lastly, review and refine them regularly to ensure they remain valid and useful. Monitor and communicate your BI metrics and KPIs to your stakeholders and customers to inform your BI decisions and actions.

4 How to Measure BI Metrics and KPIs

Measuring your BI metrics and KPIs requires a systematic and consistent approach, which involves collecting, analyzing, and reporting data from various sources and methods. To effectively measure your BI metrics and KPIs, you should first define your data sources and methods, such as databases, surveys, interviews, or experiments. It's important to ensure that the data sources and methods are reliable, valid, and ethical. Furthermore, you should set up data collection and analysis tools that are accurate, efficient, and user-friendly. Once the tools are set up, you can collect and analyze the data according to a predefined schedule, frequency, and scope. To ensure the accuracy of the data quality, consistency, and completeness of the analysis results, you should check for errors or anomalies. Finally, you should report and communicate your results to stakeholders and customers in a clear manner with visualizations, stories or recommendations to highlight key findings.

5 How to Improve Your BI Metrics and KPIs

Improving your BI metrics and KPIs requires a continuous and collaborative process that involves learning, testing, and iterating your BI solutions based on your data and feedback. To begin, compare your actual results with your expected targets and baselines to identify any gaps or deviations, as well as any trends, patterns, or anomalies that indicate potential opportunities or risks. Then, investigate and understand the underlying causes and drivers of your gaps or opportunities. After that, design and implement solutions that address the root causes and drivers. Finally, monitor and evaluate the outcomes of your solutions on your BI metrics and KPIs, while collecting feedback from stakeholders and customers to refine or adjust your solutions as needed.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?