Four Tips to Help Reach Your Business Intelligence Goals

Blog: Bizagi Blog

The age of Intelligent Process Automation is seeing businesses all around the globe develop at a rapid pace and realize the benefits of new digital technologies. One of the keys to success is using Business Intelligence (BI) to make data-driven decisions, which improve accuracy and achieve greater business results.

BI is being recognized in companies worldwide as a key corporate asset that enterprises use for differentiation. But the process of implementing state of the art BI strategies requires funding, agility, and collaboration between governance, business, and IT areas. Failure to do so gives the initiative a high risk of failure.

So, if you want to meet your Business Intelligence goals and ultimately achieve better business results, you need to first fully understand what BI is. According to Forrester (Drive Business Insight With Effective BI Strategy):

“Business intelligence is a set of methodologies, processes, architectures, and technologies — supported by organizational structures, roles, and responsibilities — that transform raw data into meaningful and useful information used to enable more effective strategic, tactical, and operational insights and decision-making that contribute to improving overall enterprise performance”.

Even with this understanding, some companies struggle with BI implementations, and the reasons for failure are mainly the same as any digital transformation initiative. Here are four ways you can ensure you meet your Business Intelligence goals.

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Take a united, agile approach

Business Intelligence requires agility. You must create agile processes or operating models to support your new BI strategy, and this requires true collaboration between your organization’s IT and business areas. But BI platforms are fed by complex solutions that require coding or subject matter experts for agile improvements, which may cause conflict between IT and business areas.

This can be helped by using process as a collaborative language, which lets both IT and business areas take an agile approach to change workflows on the fly. This is far more effective than a dashboard fed by multiple data sources and legacy systems because if anything changes, it requires an expert to fix it by coding and re-integrating the dashboard with those sources. When IT and business areas are talking the language of process, communication flows differently, objectives are created and met in collaboration, and any future improvement will succeed as the teams are already used to work as one.

Automate manual data collection

If your Business Intelligence goal is to make more informed and better decisions to guide the business, you need to have access to all the relevant data. It is likely that some of this is still being gathered via manual processes.

Think of monthly financial reporting for example, it’s still reported manually by financial analysts who grab data from different sources and feed this into spreadsheets. Some companies with a higher level of sophistication create database management systems or custom coding to retrieve the information, but this ends up doubling the effort, time and resources to maintain and run.

A more efficient approach is to use an orchestration layer that can deliver end-to-end automation. This includes RPA capabilities to eliminate some of the manual tasks, as well as native integration to automate any Excel-related task. This orchestrator can then serve as a data-gathering solution, so you have the most relevant data at hand to plug into the BI solution of your preference.

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Offer context-driven customer experiences

To win the customer experience battle, every organization should be looking for ways to offer exactly the right products and services to the right customer, at the right time. Business Intelligence plays a key role in this area. Now you have collected the right information, you need to hand it over to the customer-facing professionals at the right point in the customer journey.

Your orchestration layer should show contextual data with relevant information to empower people with the right tools to deliver an outstanding customer experience. Then you can derive BI insights through dashboards than enable real-time performance measurement, as well as incorporating technologies like Artificial Intelligence capabilities to suggest best next actions.

Incentivize users to explore Business Intelligence platforms

It’s not uncommon for a variety of BI solutions to be used within the same organization. Some employees may prefer one tool over the other, but in the end, they are all helping to scale the BI initiative. It is important to spread best practices and evangelize throughout the company to demonstrate the benefits of Business Intelligence and the impact it has on the business.

Even if you are incentivizing everyone to explore BI solutions, you need to make sure you have a powerful orchestration layer with native integrations to leading BI applications in place to offer that 360º view of your business.

Bear these tips in mind when integrating your BI solutions with an Intelligent Automation Platform and you’ll be on your way to achieving your Business Intelligence goals in no time.

Ready to start? Download the latest version of Bizagi and try the built-in integrations with Tableau and Power BI, and empower your company with the power of information!