7 Best Practices for Improved Business Intelligence
What is Business Intelligence?
Business intelligence (BI) is the process of gathering, analyzing, and reporting data to help make better business decisions. Businesses use business intelligence to gain insight into their operations, customer behavior, and market trends in order to improve performance and efficiency.
The importance of business intelligence cannot be overstated in today’s increasingly competitive environment. Companies that fail to invest in the tools they need to gather and analyze data will fall behind their competitors who are using these tools effectively.
Choose the right tool
With the right tools, your business intelligence can be so much more than just a bunch of numbers on a screen. It can be a window into your company’s future.
One of the best ways to choose the right tool is to do your research. Make sure that you know what kind of data you need to store, and make sure that the solution you choose has room for growth. It’s also important to think about how much time you have to invest in managing your data and what kind of support you’ll need if something goes wrong with your tool.
It’s important to remember that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to business intelligence solutions. It’s important that we take time to understand our needs before jumping into any kind of solution blindly because this will help us save money and time down the road as well as make sure that we’re getting exactly what we need from the chosen tool.
Identify and track key performance indicators
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics that reflect the performance of your business. They help you measure and monitor your success, so you can identify opportunities for improvement and make better decisions about where to focus your time, energy and resources.
The best practice for identifying and tracking KPIs for business intelligence is to create a dashboard that shows how each KPI relates to one another. For example, if you want to increase sales revenue, you can look at the sales team’s customer acquisition rate, customer retention rate and customer satisfaction rate. Then, when you see that one of these metrics is falling short of its goal, you’ll know which area needs attention first.
Extend your data to discover more opportunities
There are a number of ways you can extend your data to discover more opportunities for business intelligence. For example, if you are a retailer who sells shoes, you can extend your data by adding information about the weather conditions at the time of purchase. If you do this, then you will be able to see how weather affects sales of different types of shoes and how much money you make on each type of shoe.
Another way is by connecting your internal systems with external ones. This can help you discover new opportunities or trends in your industry. For example, if you have an e-commerce store, it might be helpful to connect it with other websites that offer similar products or services so that you can see how they attract customers and what makes them successful.
Better understand your data
One of the most important parts of business intelligence is understanding your data better. You can’t make decisions based on inaccurate or incomplete information, but even if you have all of the data you need, it can be hard to understand what it means.
If you’re trying to understand how much money your company spends in marketing, for example, think about how much it costs to buy a billboard ad on the side of a highway. Then ask yourself: How many cars pass by that billboard every day? If there are ten cars passing by every minute and each car passes by four times per day, then there are 40 cars passing by per hour and 160 cars passing by per day. Divide those numbers into whatever price tag your company paid for that billboard ad, and you’ll be able to get an idea of whether or not it was worth it.
The same principle applies to all kinds of data analysis—whether it’s looking at sales figures or customer satisfaction surveys or anything else that might help give you insight into how well your business is doing and what needs improvement.
Curate your data and make it easy to find
Curation can be defined as the process of selecting and arranging information in a way that makes it easy for people to find what they need. This means that if you are trying to improve your business intelligence, you should start by making sure you have a good understanding of how your organization uses data, then curating the information so that it is accessible and easy to find.
Here are some tips for making your data easier to find:
- Create a single source of truth for all company data.
- Use tags to categorize and organize information.
- Curate your data by removing outdated or irrelevant information from the system.
Share your data throughout your company
The best way to share your data throughout your company is to create a central repository for all the information. If you have multiple users across departments, it’s important to set up a system that allows them to access the same data and see it in real time.
For example, let’s say you’re looking at sales figures for one product. You want to see how many of them were sold in each region and what the average order size was. If you were only tracking this information on paper, it would be difficult for you to find out exactly where customers are buying more of this product or why they’re not buying as much of it as they used to. It would also be hard for someone else in another department who wants to use these same figures in their presentation about new products coming out next year because they wouldn’t have access to all of this information since it wasn’t centralized.
Keep up with data as it changes
The best way to keep up with data as it changes is by using a tool like iAuditor by SafetyCulture. With iAuditor, you can detect new trends and patterns in your data. It also helps you find insights in your data that would otherwise be difficult to find, like connections between different data points or new ways to use the data. This allows for continuous monitoring of your business data and allows you to respond quickly when it changes.
Improving Business Intelligence with Today’s Best Practices
Business intelligence is a powerful resource for any business, especially an established one looking to improve. The type of data you’re able to collect with BI can help you make informed decisions about your business that might not otherwise be available. And when you look at it from this perspective, you can’t afford to ignore the value of business intelligence.
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