Importance of Business intelligence
Enterprises use business intelligence strategies and technologies to analyze their business data and gain historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. BI technologies can handle large amounts of complex, structured, and unstructured data to help identify and develop new strategic business opportunities. Identifying new opportunities based on insights can produce a competitive market advantage and long-term stability.
BI’s common functions include data mining, analytical processing, complex event processing, business performance management, reporting, dashboard development, and predictive and prescriptive analytics. Business intelligence tools primarily empower organizations to assess demand and suitability of products and services for different market segments, gauge the impact of marketing efforts, and gain insights into new markets.
Enterprises often use business intelligence to support a wide range of operational elements—product positioning and pricing—to further strategic goals, priorities, and business decisions. How does this work? BI is more effective because it can combine external data derived from the market and internal sources such as financial and operations data. Combining internal and external data can give a complete picture of your business, creating an “intelligence” that cannot be derived from any singular dataset.
Why is BI implementation complicated or challenging?
The objective of BI is to use data to advance business, but the technical aspect of it presents some perplexity. Server capacity, network bandwidth, and other technical hurdles prevent companies from reaching their BI maturity goal. Moreover, for an organization to maximize the value generated from business intelligence requires maintaining the necessary data privacy, security, and audit controls.
Several BI tools are expanding rapidly, and their proponents are many, so choosing the right one can be a daunting task. Very few companies make the right decision about which tool to use to adhere to their business needs. However, most of the tools available in the market now can be tailored to suit your business environment.
Governance is key
BI governance is the key. To understand BI governance, you first need to understand the nature of business intelligence as it will be deployed within the organization. This includes several pieces: the infrastructure encapsulating hardware, software, and resources you will apply to glean intelligence from data.
BI governance is critical to ensure that your BI team creates and maintains high-value content. Most companies fail to create a comprehensive BI governance strategy that properly balances content management, content engagement, and access control for their BI initiative.
Achieving BI governance
BI governance should extend well beyond security and basic data governance—it’s a holistic approach that focuses on BI resource optimization while building trust with the users.
Access control
Allowing users to discover appropriate information by enabling them to request access while protecting sensitive data from unauthorized access is crucial in BI governance.
Maximizing user engagement
One of the most effective measures of BI governance is the widespread use of analytics across various business units to collate user data to understand user engagement rates.
What is BI governance?
BI governance is the collection of tools, strategies, and processes that enable an organization to maximize the value generated from business intelligence while ensuring that necessary data privacy, security, and audit controls are maintained.
Failing to implement an efficient BI governance strategy can overload project management teams with BI development leading to frustrated BI users and loss of credibility for the BI solution. BI governance programs can change the attitude and approach towards BI development and operations.
Is your organization facing the following issues?
- Incompatible and inconsistent data sources
- Disparate systems
- Information overload
- Cost to achieve high-quality data
- Low credibility of reported information
- Regulatory requirements unable to report status
- Incompatible decision support system
If so, it is time to set up the BI governance strategy for your business that ensures that the BI solution proceeds in the right direction. The solution architecture should be flexible enough to absorb business changes and support the addition of new requirements. A good BI governance strategy ensures that the BI solution fixes both immediate issues and supports the long-term vision.
How to set up BI governance?
BI governance consists of six elements:
- Vision – define the ground rules for BI governance
- Principles – set of policies, standards, frameworks, and methodologies to manage BI projects
- Procedure – data, people, process, and technology adhere to enterprise business rules
- Organization structure – definition of roles and responsibilities
- Metrics – set of KPIs and competencies to monitor
- Tools – Tools and technologies supporting BI governance
How effective is your BI governance?
For enterprise business intelligence deployments to be successful, it is critical to establish a governance layer because business users do not consume data directly. They access it through BI tools which make having BI governance critical to ensure that analytics delivered to business users is intensely scrutinized. Users can lose trust in the analytics without a comprehensive governance layer, making the BI spend meaningless.
You will yield the following results in a well-governed BI environment:
- Content is secure, but BI reports are not hidden from business users
- Self-service BI works for users of different business units
- Business users can access an uncluttered BI environment
- Data quality is maintained across every part of the BI solution
- Users will gravitate to BI tools for day-to-day decision making
PreludeSys helps achieve effective BI governance
We understand that establishing a BI governance layer is critical to make your BI deployments successful. We implement the right processes, strategies, and tools to build trust in the analytics we deliver to end-users and establish a solid ROI around business intelligence. Our unified BI approach pulls all BI assets together into a single, governed framework.
Interested to know more? Talk to us now!
