BI Strategy – How Do I Build This House? Select this link to get in touch and schedule a BI Strategy overview with InsightSPI.
Pervasive analytics and fact-based decision-making are game-winners in high performing organization.
Yet, many progressive organizations are faced with seemingly prohibitive barriers to entry. The challenge of getting the business to work in concert with IT has stymied more than one project. InsightSPI can help develop BI strategies that overcome many of the perceived obstacles standing in the way of success.
Does Your Reporting & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Look Like This?
Most large organizations have no fewer than five major reporting and analysis tools, along with data silos that cannot “talk to each other”, and inconsistent reporting across the business that constantly violates “one version of the truth”. How do you make that work?
The natural gap that prevails between the business and IT is pervasive in many organizations. Bridging that gap is the challenge. Business intelligence and performance management initiatives, typically sponsored by IT, are customarily not well adapted by the business. This is due to various reasons of which can be summed up as the “BI outcome does not meet the business needs”. Thereby, the business won’t use it. The business will find another way via Excel or by creating its’ own "shadow IT” to satisfy its’ needs. This meets with limited success since high-impact enterprise BI and performance management capabilities (e.g. profitability analysis) are virtually impossible without active participation by IT.
Overcoming Two Barriers
From an IT perspective, standardization of tools, platforms and information historically hasn’t worked. Business user adoption/rejection is one of the two most common reasons BI and performance management initiatives fail. InsightSPI helps our customers (both IT and the business) focus standardization efforts more on defining the use case (i.e. how the tools should be used and why) and less on stipulating which tools are “allowed”. Additionally, InsightSPI is a customer-centric vendor-neutral approach to tool and platform selection. Our visibility and experience with the market-leading and emerging BI and performance platforms transfers to objective evaluations that meet and exceed BI requirements.
The second common reason BI strategies and initiatives succeed or fail is data management and quality. Business users need timely information delivery along with data accuracy. This is not easily achieved without a comprehensive information management strategy and roadmap. InsightSPI provides deep/broad expertise and proven information management frameworks to help facilitate a sound information management strategy that delivers accurate accessible meaningful data and information.
Leveraging New Technologies & Approaches
Continually emerging technologies have an affect on a strategy. InsightSPI helps our clients clarify the choices faced when developing their BI strategies. In particular, the convergence of cloud computing with BI, as well as Self-Service reporting/analytics can generate questions and opportunities for organizations. We help our customers answer the following questions:
How can organizations leverage “cloud” technologies and deployment strategies for business intelligence and information management? Should I be concerned over security and governance? How can I quickly and seamlessly move large data volumes into and out of a cloud? How can we realize cloud benefits of on-demand scalability? What are the potential savings and reductions in IT costs and capital expenditures? What are the business (non IT) benefits? How can we manage advanced and new analytic workloads? What is the right governance model for cloud data management?
How do I make sure users understand the data nuances in order to accurately self-service e.g. the difference between ship-to-customer vs. sold-to-customer? Does self-service reporting mean no reliance on IT? Are in-memory reporting technologies only for casual users, or power users as well? What is the impact of self-service reporting on our data governance and management strategies? How do I integrate operational reporting with self-service analytics? What is the infrastructure impact of refreshing data sets every time there is a change? Do I model hierarchies and standardize data structures with self-service tool usage?
Select this link to get in touch and schedule a BI Strategy overview with InsightSPI.
Considering The Cost
Market-leading BI tools and technologies often come with high price tags and significant (soft and hard) costs that present barriers for enterprise deployments and widespread use. InsightSPI delivers BI strategies that leverage tools and technologies our customers already own, or may be significantly cost-favorable.
InsightSPI can help your organization develop a successful strategy.
You have to start somewhere. Click the button below for a custom roadmap to jump-start your business intelligence strategy.
