Business intelligence (BI) is the process of collecting, analyzing, and presenting data to support decision-making and improve performance in various domains. BI can help you gain insights into your customers, competitors, markets, operations, and more. But how can you get started with BI if you are new to this field? Here are some steps to help you.
Before you dive into BI tools and techniques, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve with BI. What are the specific questions you want to answer, the problems you want to solve, or the opportunities you want to explore? How will you measure your success and track your progress? Defining your goals will help you focus your BI efforts and align them with your business strategy.
One thing I've found helpful is conducting a thorough assessment of the organization's data needs and goals. Understanding what insights and metrics are crucial for decision-making will help define the scope and objectives of the BI initiative. Actually, I disagree with the approach of rushing into selecting BI tools without proper research and evaluation. It's essential to thoroughly assess different BI solutions to find the one that aligns with the organization's needs, scalability, and budget. An example I've seen is starting with a pilot project. By selecting a specific department or area within the organization to implement BI, it allows for testing and proof of concept before scaling up.
Unfortunately you cannot choose a tool on behalf of your organisation. You will be (in most cases) working with the tools purchased by your organisation. You can select to only specialise in one set of tools and then work on that tool basis. In reality this is what usually happens.
The next step is to identify where you will get the data you need for your BI project. Data sources can include internal databases, external sources, surveys, web analytics, social media, and more. You need to evaluate the quality, relevance, and availability of the data sources, and how they can be integrated and accessed. You also need to ensure that you comply with the data privacy and security regulations and policies that apply to your data.
My 2 cents on how to better maintain/choose Data sources - 1. Evaluate Data Quality - lookout for clean data, and remove datapoints with that won't be useful. Inaccuracy in data can lead to bad BI strategies later. 2. Seamless Integration - it's never a harm to explore platforms that can utilize integration from multiple data sources. 3. Continuous Evaluation - Business needs change and so should your data source
Once you have your data sources, you need to choose the BI tools that will help you process, analyze, and visualize the data. There are many BI tools available in the market, ranging from simple spreadsheets to complex software platforms. You need to consider your budget, skills, and needs when selecting your BI tools. Some of the features you may look for include data integration, data cleansing, data modeling, data analysis, data visualization, dashboard creation, report generation, and collaboration.
You'll most likely use the tool what your company already has. But how do you pick the tool for the job? To answer that question, you need to think about your end goal. Do you want to analyze the data your self and present it to the end-users? Or Do your end-users need a tool that keeps track of the health of the business and gets periodic updates? You can't just select a tool randomly. Defined your goal and go from there.
After you have your BI tools, you need to implement your BI solution according to your goals and design. This may involve setting up the data infrastructure, loading and transforming the data, creating the data models and queries, performing the data analysis, building the dashboards and reports, and testing and validating the results. You may also need to train and support the users who will use the BI solution and provide them with the necessary documentation and guidance.
The final step is to monitor and improve your BI solution over time. You need to collect feedback from the users and stakeholders, evaluate the performance and impact of the BI solution, and identify any issues or gaps that need to be addressed. You also need to update and maintain the data and the BI tools regularly, and incorporate any changes or enhancements that may be required. You should also look for new ways to leverage your BI solution and explore new data sources and techniques that may add value to your business.
After you have made some progress on creating your BI Solution, I recommend maintaining it as per the industry standard. - Run it through your performance/growth team to see how to leverage the Data. - Maintain some transparency with Stakeholder so even they view their growth. - Keep optimizing
Getting started with Business Intelligence (BI) is a management role that basically involves understanding business needs (as the title rightly describes). As a guide to begin a BI journey: 1. Identify the business goals and objectives; What does the business aim to achieve? What metrics and KPIs can be used to monitor and improve success? 2. Identify data sources; Consider both internal and external data sources that can solve the business problems. 3. Select BI tools; Good understanding of appropriate BI tools and data approach. What BI process to employ (ELT - Extract, Load and Transform data / ETL- Extract, Transform and Load data), depends on the destination system. 4. Implement BI solution. 5. Evaluate and monitor progress.