Business Intelligence (BI) is a platform that uses the data that your business creates to help you make advanced business decisions. Starting to use data for business intelligence involves several key steps to effectively gather the data you want to sort through and successfully analyze it in a way that can allow you to understand your business better.
Start By Defining Your Objectives
Clearly define your business goals and objectives that you want to achieve through business intelligence. This could include improving operational efficiency, increasing revenue, reducing costs, or better understanding your operation or customers.
Identify Key Metrics
Determine the metrics you are going to use. This may take some time as you will want to craft your metric algorithms in a way that will give you the most accurate representation of your business.
Collect Data
Gather relevant data from various sources within your organization, such as databases, spreadsheets, CRM systems, websites, and other places. Ensure that the data is accurate and up to date so that you aren’t dealing with old information that isn’t as relevant. That’s why you should ensure the quality of your data by addressing issues like duplicate records, missing values, and data inconsistencies. You will want to integrate data from different sources into a unified data repository or data warehouse. This step may require data transformation and cleansing, and will likely be the largest cost of setting up the entire BI system.
Choose a BI Tool That’s Right for Your Needs
You will want to select the right business intelligence tools and software that suit your needs. Most of the most powerful BI platforms tend to have similar features, but the knowledgeable technology professionals at North Central Technologies can present you with options that will work best for your particular situation.
If you believe knowledge is power and are looking to unlock the benefits that a comprehensive business intelligence platform can provide, we can help. Give our team a call today at 978-798-6805 for more information.
