In the current age of digital transformation, the abundance of data available brings a wealth of opportunities. Whilst organisations without the capabilities to harness data insights may face challenges, business intelligence (BI) and BI analytics can unearth invaluable insights.
What is business intelligence?
Business intelligence is a process that leverages technology to gather, analyse and structure data. Business intelligence predominantly represents the organisation’s data within a dashboard or other reporting medium. It takes raw data and turns it into valuable insights that can support strategic decision-making.
The vital components of business intelligence include:
- Data collection and integration
- Data analysis and modelling
- Data visualisation
- Reporting
- Decision support.
Gathering data using a traditional data analysis approach is a simple process, but the correct process and structure must be followed to this data to give it business value. Without the internal resources and skills available, many businesses are required to partner with an experienced BI analytics consultancy for the successful delivery of a business intelligence project.
What is a data dashboard?
Data dashboards are information management tools that workforces can use to track KPIs, metrics, and other essential data points. They generate data visualisations to simplify complex data sets and provide awareness of current performance at a glance.
How can BI analytics generate value for a business?
Similarly to data analytics, business intelligence considers historical data such as market trends and sales patterns, but BI analytics also uses this data to model and visualise the future.
Through data dashboards, this data is brought to life with visualisations that allow users to quickly generate graphs, charts and reports to help inform their business decisions. The key areas where BI analytics generate business value include:
- Supporting strategic decision-making
- Informing sales and marketing efforts
- Enhancing the customer experience
- Boosting productivity
- Ensuring data accuracy and compliance.
Challenges for business intelligence projects
There are several reasons why a business intelligence project may fail, including failing to seek the correct expertise from a consultancy to fill internal skills gaps and address challenges that arise. Some of these challenges include:
Executive sponsorship and alignment
Buy-in from senior management is required to ensure the right resources and funding are available for the project, but also alignment with IT teams. Some of the biggest challenges that businesses face with business intelligence projects are architectural systems and connections to underlying source systems. This means it is vital to have people who understand the data involved with the project, as well as involvement from IT teams and senior levels.
Change management
Without a change management strategy, many businesses struggle to manage the cultural shift that surrounds the implementation of BI tools. Endorsing a data culture and ensuring adequate change management can help plan how wider team members will engage with the project and get on board.
Insufficient testing
If testing between the client and consultancy is inadequate or incomplete, this results in the failure to deliver the anticipated outcome and makes it difficult to manage expectations of the outcome of the project.
How does Dufrain implement the BI process?
The right BI solution will convert your data into well-structured, analysable insights. BI and analytics offer a way to access all your business data in a single unified place, with insights that are clear to see and action to help support commercial outcomes.
At Dufrain, we help our clients gain a holistic view of their BI and analytics projects. Our process is simple and involves the following steps:
- From our first consultation, we work closely with our clients, we understand their problems and the objectives of their business intelligence project
- We aim to understand the source systems, data and the data quality of these source systems to determine whether there will be any challenges in achieving the desired outcomes
- We ensure the project plan is structured and geared around the challenges the business is facing today and the perceived problems or opportunities for the future
- As Dufrain is technology agnostic, we provide the right BI solution for your business and partner with the leading software providers, with access to an extensive range of BI tools
- For a commercial-grade solution that will stand the test of time, we model the data in a suitable way with full reconciliation through to the report stage, to ensure this information is integrated seamlessly into any reporting.
Are you ready to get started with business intelligence?
Wherever you are on your BI journey, Dufrain offers the expertise to ensure the process is a success alongside access to customisable, cloud-based dashboards for data visualisation. We have considerable experience in designing the essential architectural blueprints, navigating the complex project management cycle and addressing the cultural challenges that many businesses face.
Get in touch to discuss your business intelligence and BI analytics requirements today.