Building a BI Strategy

When it comes to business intelligence, companies face a range of challenges depending on where they are in their BI journey. These include the cost, time, and skilled professionals needed to implement BI tools. As a business intelligence professional, your objective is to help the organization achieve its strategic, tactical, and operational goals.

Before embarking on a BI journey, you need to understand the importance of having one and assure that the strategy aligns with the business goals. BI can have a direct positive impact on business performance and dramatically improve the ability to accomplish the mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. To help you put a strategy together, below are a few guidelines you can follow to assist you.

Have a framework
Having a structure will provide you with a broad overview of how different components of your BI strategy fit together to assist the entire BI vision. It brings the three top forces together that drive business operations which are: people, processes, and technology in a collaborative environment.

Your BI framework should begin by setting the business’s overall objective and what is intended to be achieved. You should understand that a smart BI framework involves connecting together BI, business processes, and collaborative applications. Having a framework will also improve the integration with business planning systems, supports business processes, performance management technologies, and users.

Best practice and tools selection
Although industry product reviews can be a good source of research, particularly if you aren't familiar with the overall market, these reviews are often focused on selecting the product with the most features. Your organization should instead select the best practice BI analytics tool that's the best fit for your company's needs, meets its budget, and can be implemented given its resources and skills.

Considering the importance of BI advantages, managers are spending larger portions of IT budgets on BI. This is because the demand required to deliver consistent, accurate, and trusted information to management and to meet the business goals is growing.

Following are just three of many best practices for BI platforms and tools selection: 

• Outline and classify business, functional, and technical requirements 
• Categorize requirements as necessary, important, and desired 
• Evaluate the functionality, features, and the fit

Collaboration and integration
Collaboration is nothing new, but for many companies, the collaborative BI journey is just beginning. With the rise of cloud computing and big data, they need to speed up the process because it is becoming increasingly important in the modern world, as we become more connected around the globe. You need to plan and adapt as BI constantly evolves and reinvents itself according to changing business needs. Consider the current BI trends and also the coming wave of forward-looking approaches for building a successful BI strategy. If implemented properly, the end result will significantly benefit an organization’s decision-making abilities.

The talent pool for individuals needed to analyze information continues to grow at a rapid rate and if you are a business intelligence professional, then you are on hiring managers' most wanted list.

With over 35 years of recruitment experience, we have built lifelong connections with a number of prominent South African IT companies and placed skilled candidates in their businesses.
If you want us to help find you a new business intelligence job opportunity, head over to our website and contact us or apply directly on our vacancy page.