Oftentimes, to become the boss, determined people create a checklist that helps them stay focused while climbing the ranks: Get a promotion after two years, collaborate with a mentor, get quoted in a trade magazine, etc. A checklist helps to stay on track and to organize the steps needed to reach your goals. The same strategy can be applied when organizations are determined to become a data and analytics-driven organization. When it comes to business intelligence, before you analyze your organization’s raw data, you need to create goals and run through a BI requirements checklist. Without a checklist, if you jump right into looking at all the collected data, you may lose sight of what results you are actually seeking. Below is a check-list to help get you started:
Define Your Business Intelligence Strategy
Ask yourself, what questions are we trying to answer? To whom do these answers matter most, and how can we involve them in the data-gathering process? To prevent captured data from becoming overwhelming or sidetracking, creating a business intelligence strategy in advance will keep the analytics focused on the main goal.
Review What You Already Know
Assessing and analyzing any current data gathering and analytics processes will help you understand what you currently know and what you need to know. Ask yourself, “What questions am I trying to answer? What would be interesting to other teams inside my organization?” This diagnostic exercise should be done before implementing a new BI strategy. Have IT and business teams review the organizational makeup surrounding the current BI operations and make sure the strategy focuses on capturing new data.
Understand Your Goals and Finalize Your Business Intelligence Checklist
You can’t give users what they want if you don’t know what that is! We categorize Business intelligence users as strategic, tactical, or operational. Strategic users use the data to forecast and plan long-term operations, tactical users gather daily data and report to department heads or stakeholders, and operational users are on the front lines using the data to further their projects. Understanding who will use BI, what their end goals are, and how it’s collected will help you when making BI decisions.
Use your checklist to ensure that you are on the right path to becoming a business intelligence and analytics-driven organization.
Let one of our business intelligence experts help you create your checklist. Contact us today to learn how business intelligence can help you gain insight and improve efficiencies.
