The Business Intelligence Journey.

Last year I wrote a blog “the cloud is a journey not a destination” and whilst many businesses are still on this journey, a new path towards business intelligence is emerging for many. 

Before I detail what the business intelligence journey looks like, it’s important to understand what I mean by business intelligence. The proliferation of data visualisation tools like Power BI, Looker and Futrli have provided a new tool set to gain insights into the information that has been trapped inside excel spreadsheets and legacy information systems.

However these tools have failed to give the full picture, as many organisations have only been able to utilise them to visualise silo’d business functions like finance or marketing. 

When organisations want a complete picture across the business, we start to see the full range of data black spots emerging. Business intelligence is about spotting a dip in revenue and then having access to comprehensive sales data to dig into the underlying cause. It’s about being able to to track sales and service data to find the reason why your NPS score dipped in a particular month. 

Like the journey to the cloud, the path to business intelligence requires some pre-work to lay the foundation which your business intelligence system will be built upon. 

The business intelligence journey is a step by step process

Digitisation of processes. 

So much of our data still resides in excel based systems that are silo’d from our organisations larger information management systems’. Combine this with legacy based software that lacks an API and you start to get an understanding of the work that needs to be undertaken before any type of business intelligence is possible. 

A great first step is to do an audit of what processes involve Excel or non API connected systems in their workflow, then start the process of implementing cloud software solutions that can support the input and management of this data. 

Once the data is housed in a structured software system, it can then be accessed via an API to be part of your business intelligence system.  

System integration

Once you’ve built a place for all of your data, we need to integrate the systems and workflows to ensure it's kept updated with the least amount of human effort possible. 

Whilst having all of your information systems in the cloud is great, we rarely have all the data in one unified software package. You might have CRM data in Salesforce, Ecommerce data in Neto and financial data in Xero. But building a complete picture of your customers means that these system need to be integrated via an API to ensure data is consistent and relevant to the decision making process. 

Integration also means that the data is automatically sent from one system to another, ensuring it is readily available, current and of a high quality. 

Data warehousing 

Once your data is in the cloud and your various systems are integrated and functioning like a Swiss watch, we can get into the fun part! 

To compare data from across your information systems we need to develop a data warehouse where we can send it, to be organised and stored, ready for your data visualisation tools to produce those amazing new dashboards. 

Data warehousing has become much more accessible recently with tools like Microsoft Data Factory and Data Warehousing offering solutions that can be quickly configured and affordably maintained in the cloud. Your data warehouse will be unique to your organisation and its designed will be dictated by the type of data you have, how often it needs to be updated and structure of the information you need to stop in the data warehouse. 

Data Visualisation.

Now that your data is being automatically sent into your data warehouse, we can start to produce the visualisations that will help you to build a data driven organisation. 

The data model that you developed for your data warehouse will enable you to compare and analyse information from each of the information systems. The challenge is to leverage your unique data model and find the appropriate visualisations that allow your users to quickly understand what the data is showing them so they can take the best course of action. 

A great place to start is replacing board reports with a series of dashboards, generally speaking the information needed to satisfy board reporting will require data from across all areas of the business. Once this reporting process has been refined, you can build dashboards for the next level of management, before continuing to drive this data down to other levels of your organisation giving everyone permission controlled, tailored access to the organisations data.  

Go start your Business Intelligence Journey. 

As I wrote in “the cloud is a journey not a destination” these types of initiatives require a constant improvement approach to realise their true benefit to the organisation, the first step is develop a strategy, get the right people involved and take the first step.