5 Ways to Raise Your Business Intelligence Quotient

Graduate from being a good company to a great company and finally to an intelligent company by enlisting the five best practices companies follow to increase their Business Intelligence Quotient.  Businesses want to quantify their performance 360-degrees, not just from a ROI perspective, but from a customer/end-user experience perspective. This is by no means an easy task. Viewing a company as a conglomerate of people performing in various roles, and driven by a set of business processes, the accuracy of such an IQ extends beyond numbers. The words “win-win” create business value only when the business benefits of easier, faster, simpler, sharper decision-making capabilities – by all users from the “C” level to the front desk – are realized when they are needed most. Below is a list of the five best practices that enables companies of any size and industry to raise the bar on BIQ or Business Intelligence Quotient:

1.  BI is everybody’s business

This is a key driver in BI adoption and empowerment by all users of a BI solution – from the corporate staff to the customer/end-user. Educating that better BI means better decision-making that leads to efficient and actionable analyses, across the company spectrum is a key performance indicator in getting everyone onboard.

2.  Data doesn’t matter if it can’t be seen

Companies must be able to trace and track the silos of data that are present in various forms – from paper to prediction – across the length and breadth of the companies’ resources. A robust BI Solution can help all of this data to be “refined” to derive the right information that is useful to the right user at the right time. The sooner your company gets going, the faster the time-to-insight which is the taken to analyze and arrive at “decision points” that when implemented can help in a better business/operational efficiency.

3.  BI’s as an innovative invention of a superior customer experience

BI helps in providing autonomy to the customer/end-user by way of self-service functionality.  When combined with interactive and responsive controls, this places the power to drive the business solution in those users’ hands. Companies should focus on differentiating between customer and end-user in terms of Power Users and contextual business roles. This is the new dynamics of being “customer-centric.” Proper enlisting of users vs. roles vs. business needs and maintaining the independence and isolation of data/metadata access and presentation is vital to a higher BIQ. And this is where managed-metadata comes into play by allowing some of the business context to be custom-defined by the end-users.  By correlating customer/end-user centric aspects with their existing BI Solutions in place, companies can efficiently manage their metadata and streamline their business processes.

4.  Right time information is the new BI imperative

From real-time to right time, time and data truly don’t wait for any user today. This can be both real-time and point-in-time, or just-in-time-relevance and authenticity of information enables efficient use of the same and is essential to a better BIQ. The ability to integrate/inter-operate with multiple existing solutions and data sources provides a value beyond revenue. Nothing is more critical to a business than the consistency, currency, and protection of all of its data-cum-information in a way that is secure, reliable, and available anytime, from anywhere, and by anyone authorized.

To this effect, companies must layout security and policies right from the early stages in their operational life cycle.  This ensures that the data/information life cycle goes in sync with the business process life cycle. Enforcing multi-factor authentication, distributed data replication, and/or data federation/syndication; rich search analytics, and industry standards-based architecture go a long way in getting the right data at the right time in the hands of the right user.

5.  Consider BI as a strategic solution for your business

BI is more than just a decision making tool. For any company, it is an evolving solution that re-invents itself based on customer/end-user experience, to adapt to the customer/users’ changing needs from time-to-time. It extends beyond intelligence to become a strategic decision-making enabler. Companies must keep this focus when deciding on a BI Solution – one that can adapt to current and future business requirements. By doing this the return-on-customer will be higher, which is an intelligent metric for quantifying success-both in terms of business value and customer/end-user experience. This requires a self-adaptable BI solution that enables a greater degree of self-service BI. A “best-fit” IT solution based on gap-fit analysis, in terms of access optimization, embedded analytics,

SaaS-enablement, and operational BI capabilities accelerates the operational efficiency. This again raises the BIQ – and better insights yield better results.

The next generation of BI is driven by a new dynamics of customer-centric imperatives that include faster time-to-insight, right time information availability & accessibility, enhanced self-service by way of self-adaptability, business-process driven and business services-oriented, multi-tenancy enabled, and one that relies on active and passive security & compliance. Not just having the ability to analyze “big data”, but the ability to enable “big decisions” that add strategic value, derived from any and every data source, however big or small, and across the enterprise, BIQ is the new Business-IT key performance indicator for a BI solution. A fine-grained analysis of business-centric requirements, followed by a robust plan for putting the above outlined principles into practice can help companies in raising the Business Intelligence Quotient – and an intelligent company, one that is tailored towards and geared by the customer/end-user.

Adapted from “Raising your ‘BIQ’ (Business Intelligence Quotient): 5 Things Your Company Can Do NOW, Focus Research