Establishing a strong business intelligence (BI) strategy for your business can be extremely rewarding for your business if it’s done correctly. The key to getting it right is having a complete strategy that combines historical BI with forward-looking predictive analytics.

Developing Reports, Dashboards and Visualizations

When it comes to creating and implementing a new BI strategy there are 4 main components that must be addressed:

1. BI Roadmap

A strong overall strategy in terms of the following are needed:

• • Reporting and analytics needs: What are the main analytics that you want to keep track of? What metrics are most important for you to improve your strategies? Where is that information coming from? Determine your primary needs and start building your strategy from there.
• • Industry KPIs: Don’t just think about your company. Research your industry KPIs - like sales, ROI and profit margins - and develop a firm understanding of these benchmarks so that you know exactly how your business is doing in the big picture.
• • Custom KPIs: There are going to be company-specific metrics that you’ll need to keep track of. Set these up early on so you know what to track and how you’re doing.
• • Historical data: You can’t fully understand your business’ progress unless you monitor its changes over time. Keeping track of historical data can help you get a bird’s eye view of your company. This, in turn, can help you learn and pinpoint exactly where your efforts are struggling or where you need to make pivots in your strategies.
• • BI Clients: Consider who will be using your BI solution and cater to their needs.

2. BI Team

Implement a BI roadmap involves a lot of work, which means that a business needs to make sure that their team can effectively organize their tasks and carry out a strong BI plan. Some of the main roles which need to be filled in a BI Team are:

• • Head of BI: Equipped with business and technological skills, The Head of BI will establish and execute the BI strategies that generate insights and improve an organization.
• • BI Developer: The developer will design and build data pipelines to integrate data from various sources, ensuring that all of the organization’s most important information is properly extracted, transformed and loaded into the data warehouse.
• • Data/Business analyst: The analyst acquires, processes and summarizes data. He/she then uses this information to supply the organization with reports, summaries, and visualizations, thereby transforming the analytics into comprehensible, actionable insights.
• • Database Admin(DBA): This role handles all things database-related. The DBA maintains database systems, creates new database applications, supports existing database applications, and manages an organization’s data and metadata.
• • Data Scientist: The data scientist utilizes computer programming, statistics, analytical tools and machine learning to pull out actionable insights from big data.

3. Data Sources

Most businesses these days have data coming in from many different sources, and all of this information must be analyzed comprehensively in order to have an accurate and effective BI strategy. This means that the following have to be gathered and analyzed in detail:

• • Core data: Data generated by your business via mobile app, website, online shop, etc.
• • Peripheral data: Data generated from purchased products or services, like a CRM or an analytics system.
• • External data: Data gathered from things like sentiment analysis.

4. Data Warehouse

The typical design choices involved in building data warehouses means determining factors like:

• • Schema design
• • Cloud vs On-premise
• • Database Size
• • Concurrency
• • Scaling