Every day organizations make many critical decisions that directly impact bottom line sales and marketing returns. There are a number of factors that go into making these decisions. Executives use experience, judgment and some intuition. But sometimes even a little bit of guess work can add to a lot of variability in decision making, and that is where Business Intelligence and Analytics play a huge role. Business decisions based on data and insights lay the foundations for long term success. Understanding trends, geospatial context, sales scenarios etc. can help executives discover business levers and focus areas.

Awareness of the market landscape and environmental context is also very critical. Who are your target customers and competing products? To position your product accurately in the market, decision makers long for good reporting and data visualization. This helps to strategize marketing campaigns, product release cycles and improve customer experience. However, in organizations a big challenge is to integrate fragmented pieces of the business information together to produce a coherent picture, which makes sense and aids decision making. An ideal situation is for your reporting to directly pick data from integrated ERP solutions. However, such a solution that allows for direct reporting may not be always present. This requires BI and Data experts to pull data together from multiple sources. Data modeling and accuracy is most challenging in these scenarios.

To manage Business Insight most effectively in your teams, I recommend starting with key questions that you need to answer to run your business. These will be your key performance indicators (KPIs). From those key questions should emerge parameters that form your KPIs. E.g. KPI for Profit will have 2 parameters - Revenue and Cost. Your reporting design should incorporate views for all parameters to be able to accurately predict business position as market environment changes. Managing business intelligence in firms is a delicate art - to realize business outcomes using IT tools and infrastructure in a way that is the most user friendly for stakeholders. This can be done using a combination of the below.

Dashboards

Dashboards allow you to see business critical KPIs all in one place. These help leadership teams and decision makers to see the status of the entire business together. They can then decide what areas to focus on and what parameters need attention. Dashboards are most effective in real time reporting and allow for on-the-go access to critical KPIs.

Reporting

Reporting is generating views and data visualizations from various different sources on a regular basis to show health of the business and focus areas. A good report should allow you to slice and dice data using different filters and provide visual graphics that summarize the key points for quick impact.

Business Insight

Insight is the action that emerges from dashboards and reports. It could be an understanding of the marketplace, effectiveness of marketing campaigns, geospatial intelligence on performance or on selling strategy. Insights based on long time horizon are proven most beneficial to leaders who use trends, forecasts and predictions in making key business decisions.

Decisions based on data allow for more pragmatic and informed actions. Definitely, leadership intuition and experience has its place, but there is always a need for tools that drive more clarity in an increasingly fast moving market landscape for all industries. BI is fast changing the way we make business decisions and the investment various companies are making in big data and analytics is just an indication. Business intelligence in business decisions is surely a necessity.

Dream Big!

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