Business intelligence functionality | Lecture notes Business Informatics

3 steps to successful data analysis with

business intelligence

Being able to make business decisions based on data is a competitive advantage. It’s important to

link analytics to business outcomes to show how BI influenced revenue-generating opportunities,

increased operational efficiencies or improved customers service. This will strengthen the business

case for analytics, show the value of the underlying data, and identify any gaps in the uses of the

analytics solution.

Gartner analyst Alan Duncan wrote:

“Mapping business value outcomes to the analytic questions and the underlying data needed to

support them highlights the value of the data being provisioned, enables the team to identify new

uses for existing data and allows any current gaps in available data to be identified.”

So what should your company be measuring? What questions do you want your data to answer?

And what actionable intelligence do you hope to take from your raw data?

The answers to these questions depend on the job role, but there are three key things that you need

to define as you prepare to explore and analyze your data, regardless of whether you’re

in sales, finance, inventory management or elsewhere.

1. Define your goals

Ultimately, you want to maximize the value that you get from your BI solution.

This starts by defining your KPIs and metrics. Among the key things that every business should

measure are financial metrics such as revenue, cash, and assets; operational metrics such as

inventory turnover and production levels; and sales and marketing metrics, including win rates, lost

sales, and leads generated.

For an idea of metrics your business could report on to improve business operations - download our

eBook on reporting metrics.

2. Define your priorities

You will get the outcomes you want once you have defined how you want your data to improve your

business. It is easy to get overwhelmed by all the opportunity, and end up not acting at all. Instead

set a list of priorities of what you want to achieve first, what is next, and so on.

What is the focus of your business this week, month or quarter? Perhaps it is increased sales within

existing customers to raise the expected customer lifetime value. Or perhaps you're going after new

sales. Or in some cases neither of these are a focus, but the business wants to sell out old stock to

start running leaner, and so its is more about what you sell. Once you have defined what is most

important to your role, department or business, you can use your BI tool provide the intelligence

needed to move forward.

3. Define your outcomes

Your BI solution should provide you with the information that can help you achieve your desired

business outcomes; those things that will make the most difference to your organization.

You can get the most from your BI tool when you understand what you want your raw data to reveal.

For example, imagine your goal is to increase revenue, and you prioritize increasing sales. Does

Partial preview of the text

Download Business intelligence functionality and more Lecture notes Business Informatics in PDF only on Docsity!

3 steps to successful data analysis with

business intelligence

Being able to make business decisions based on data is a competitive advantage. It’s important to link analytics to business outcomes to show how BI influenced revenue-generating opportunities, increased operational efficiencies or improved customers service. This will strengthen the business case for analytics, show the value of the underlying data, and identify any gaps in the uses of the analytics solution. Gartner analyst Alan Duncan wrote: “Mapping business value outcomes to the analytic questions and the underlying data needed to support them highlights the value of the data being provisioned, enables the team to identify new uses for existing data and allows any current gaps in available data to be identified.” So what should your company be measuring? What questions do you want your data to answer? And what actionable intelligence do you hope to take from your raw data? The answers to these questions depend on the job role, but there are three key things that you need to define as you prepare to explore and analyze your data, regardless of whether you’re in sales, finance, inventory management or elsewhere.

1. Define your goals

Ultimately, you want to maximize the value that you get from your BI solution. This starts by defining your KPIs and metrics. Among the key things that every business should measure are financial metrics such as revenue, cash, and assets; operational metrics such as inventory turnover and production levels; and sales and marketing metrics, including win rates, lost sales, and leads generated. For an idea of metrics your business could report on to improve business operations - download our eBook on reporting metrics.

2. Define your priorities

You will get the outcomes you want once you have defined how you want your data to improve your business. It is easy to get overwhelmed by all the opportunity, and end up not acting at all. Instead set a list of priorities of what you want to achieve first, what is next, and so on. What is the focus of your business this week, month or quarter? Perhaps it is increased sales within existing customers to raise the expected customer lifetime value. Or perhaps you're going after new sales. Or in some cases neither of these are a focus, but the business wants to sell out old stock to start running leaner, and so its is more about what you sell. Once you have defined what is most important to your role, department or business, you can use your BI tool provide the intelligence needed to move forward.

3. Define your outcomes

Your BI solution should provide you with the information that can help you achieve your desired business outcomes; those things that will make the most difference to your organization. You can get the most from your BI tool when you understand what you want your raw data to reveal. For example, imagine your goal is to increase revenue, and you prioritize increasing sales. Does

your business need to focus on lost business, underperforming products or regions with new business opportunities? When you know what you want your analysis to reveal, it makes it easier to begin the analysis process. Your BI solution should allow you to drill deep into your data, providing a consolidated view of products, customers and financial data. As your single source of truth, your BI solution should facilitate a level of analysis that should eliminate doubt and wonder while uncovering what is really going on with your business.

What is Data Lineage

Data Lineage is defined as the life cycle of the data. Data Lineage shows the complete data flow from origin to destination. Data lineage is the process of understanding, documenting and visualizing the data from its origin to its consumption. This life cycle includes all the transformation done on the dataset from its origin to destination. Data lineage gives a better understanding to the user of what happened to the data throughout the life cycle. It also enables companies to trace the errors, implementing changes in the process and implementing system migration to save time and resources for efficiency. Data Lineage helps the user to make sure if the data is coming from the reliable data source, transformations are done appropriately and loaded correctly to the designated location. Data Lineage plays an important role where key decisions rely on accurate information. Without appropriate technology and processes in place tracking, data can be virtually impossible or at the very least a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Data lineage enables the tracking of the data stream from its both endpoints to ensure the data is accurate and consistent. It allows the user to look for the data in both directions (forward and backward) between origin to destination of the data. Data Lineage provides us the answers for any specific dataset such as: o Who created the data? o What information does the data contain? o Where is the data located? o When was the data created? o Why does the data exist? Designing more intuitive system for BI: Intuitive BI focuses on the business of the organisation, enabling data held within partner applications to be more valuable to their customers. Intuitive provides personalised information to business: Right Person, Right Information, and Right Time. Ultimately, Intuitive BI tools improve individual, team and organisational performance by empowering employees with the most relevant information for enhanced decision-making. Unlike traditional BI software, it is intuitive, extremely easy to use and can be implemented in days rather than months, swiftly delivering dramatic business benefits.

In the new business era, large volume of business information is created by every organizational operation. The effective collecting, handling, analysing & communicating of this unstructured, raw data unveils the way to the strategic management’s “holy grail”, the desirable competitive advantage. Business Intelligence (BI) offers the technological, theoretical, methodological framework which enables the mentioned data exploitation so as to provide organizations with meaningful business insights. ICAP Business intelligence capability is a discipline made up of several related activities, including data mining, online analytical processing, querying and reporting combined with consulting services. Decision Support Tools are critical part of the BI technology. They are computer-based applications that serve the solving process of a wide variety of decision making problems by offering great data interaction, modelling and analysis. Thus, organizational information can lead successfully to business action. Our customers use BI to improve decision making, cut costs and identify new business opportunities. BI is more than just corporate reporting and more than a set of tools to coax data out of enterprise systems. CIOs use BI to identify inefficient business processes that are ripe for re-engineering. With today’s BI tools, business users can jump in and start analyzing data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run complex reports. This democratization of information access helps users back up—with hard numbers—business decisions that would otherwise be based only on gut feelings and estimations. Although BI holds great promise, implementations can be dogged by technical and cultural challenges. We help our customers to ensure that the data feeding BI applications are clean and consistent so that users trust it. One crucial component of BI—business analytics—is quietly essential to the success of companies in a wide range of industries. Examples: For example, many restaurant chains are heavy users of BI solutions. They use BI to make strategic decisions, such as what new products to add to their menus, which dishes to remove and which underperforming stores to close. They also use BI for tactical matters such as renegotiating contracts with food suppliers and identifying opportunities to improve inefficient processes. Because restaurant chains are so operations-driven, and because BI is so central to helping them run their businesses, they are among the elite group of companies across all industries that are actually getting real value from these systems. Also, in retail, big retailers uses vast amounts of data and category analysis to dominate the industry. Amazon and Yahoo aren't just e-commerce sites; they are extremely analytical and follow a "test and learn" approach to business changes. Capital One runs more than 30,000 experiments a year to identify desirable customers and price credit card offers.

Good BI systems need to give context. It's not enough that they report sales were X yesterday and Y a year ago that same day. They need to explain what factors influencing the business caused sales to be X one day and Y on the same date the previous year. Like so many technology projects, BI won’t yield returns if users feel threatened by, or are skeptical of, the technology and refuse to use it as a result. And when it comes to something like BI, which, when implemented strategically, ought to fundamentally change how companies operate and how people make decisions, CIOs need to be extra attentive to users' feelings. In business intelligence projects we do take into consideration all the factors which will result in a successful and meaningful project. Therefore take care of:  Data quality by making sure data is clean  Train users effectively  Follow an iterative approach deploying quickly and then adjust as we go. We evolve as the business evolves  Design the right architecture from the start. We take an integrated approach to building a solution protecting our customers from locking themselves into an unworkable data strategy further down the road  We define ROI clearly before we start and outline the specific benefits expected to achieve. Furthermore we do a reality check every quarter or six months.  Focus on business objectives. Our service offering creates business added-value by  Aligning organization towards its objectives  Providing meaningful business insights through in-depth analysis  Identifying new business opportunities; boosting both up-selling and cross-selling  Reducing information bottleneck by allowing end-user’s data interaction without the IT Specialists’ involvement Business Intelligence and Decision Support Tools implementation:  Provides adequate, elaborated, exact, up-to-date information on demand  Enables faster and efficient problem solving  Enables effective data mining  Reduces the labor costs by automating the data manipulation and exploitation process  Reveals the organizations’ Big Picture; ability of examining thoroughly where it has been, where it is and where it is heading to  Enhances the organization learning process; raw, unstructured information is transformed into business knowledge ICAP Management Consultants have been involved in sophisticated Business Intelligence and Decision Support Tools implementations at many firms, across industries and can demonstrate extensive experience which can be applied to several leading Business intelligence Tools.

Business intelligence functionality, Lecture notes of Business Informatics

Partial preview of the text

Download Business intelligence functionality and more Lecture notes Business Informatics in PDF only on Docsity!

3 steps to successful data analysis with

business intelligence

1. Define your goals

2. Define your priorities

3. Define your outcomes

What is Data Lineage