The Ten Commandments of an Effective Business Intelligence (BI) Program

 

Businesses are always looking for new ways to gain a competitive advantage over their competitors. One main way to do this is to incorporate a solid business intelligence (BI) strategy as its backbone. Business intelligence has become an important part of business management by helping to improve decision making in enterprises.  Business intelligence solutions represent a complex task, technology, and information system application that supports the planning and analytical activities of enterprises (Imanuel, 2022).

According to (Imanuel, 2022), the ten commandments of a successful business intelligence program are:

1.      Establish and Incorporate a BI vision – The enterprise must determine the role that BI technology will play in ensuring the business strategies are met.

2.      Develop a BI roadmap – Create a guideline for the integration of the BI, make sure the roadmap works to make sure the business objectives are met and are prioritized to meet the company’s vision.

3.      Develop the BI governance and funding process – Establish support structures and business intelligence communities to help lead to its success. Also secure adequate funding for the BI process.

4.      Establish a BI Competency Center (BICC) – The BICC is a pool of skilled specialists and resources that can be incorporated into all units of the business.

5.      Align Business and IT – It will take years to develop a fully successful BI solution, business and IT objectives must be aligned to support this long term.

6.      Create and employ a data dictionary – The data dictionary is a collection of definitions, names, and attributes that are being collected in a database and can be used to support the BI program and its needs.

7.      Track and Measure ROI on BI – Since BI is a long term project, track ROI on the BI solution, as ROI starts to drop, go back to the drawing board and re-evaluate the BI strategy.

8.      Build Trust in the BI system – Ensure the right team owns the solution and is making decisions according to their predefined expertise and objectives.

9.      Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPI) – KPIs are at the center of a good BI strategy and are values that show if a business is effectively attaining its objective over time.

10.   Assess the current situation – Before adopting a BI solution, determine what is working for the company, keep that, then identify and target the areas that are not providing any business value.

               Knowledge management is important to have in order for companies to make more informed decisions. By ensuring the company’s workforce has access to the general expertise held within the organization, the more informed workforce can respond quicker to business opportunities (Monterey, 2022). In both knowledge management and business intelligence, data is collected organized, analyzed, grouped and aggregated in order to aid in business decision making. The goal of BI is to provide organizations with both historical and current data that will allow them to make better strategic decisions, there for allowing them to gain a competitive advantage. Because the primary elements of BI are analyzing and manipulating data, the creation of new knowledge is carried out through knowledge management. The organization creates, stores, transfers, and applies knowledge, in turn, learning occurs when the organization is able to learn from its environment and incorporate knowledge into processes through knowledge management (Monterey, 2022).

 

References

Imanuel. (2022, April 15). Top 10 guidelines for a successful business intelligence strategy in 2022 - reviews, features, pricing, comparison. PAT Research. Retrieved August 22, 2022, from https://www.predictiveanalyticstoday.com/top-guidelines-for-a-successful-business-intelligence/

Monterey, T. (2022, January 30). How does knowledge management systems fit into business intelligence? International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD). Retrieved August 23, 2022, from https://www.ictsd.org/how-does-knowledge-management-systems-fit-into-business-intelligence/