Business intelligence strategy is seen as a roadmap designed to help companies measure their performance and strengthen their performance through architecture and solutions. Therefore, creating a successful BI strategy roadmap would have a great positive impact on organization efficiency. How to develop a smart BI strategy?

Here are 6 steps to make your BI strategy creating goes easier.

What is a successful BI strategy?

A competent business intelligence strategy should bring companies incomparable competitive advantages. A business intelligence strategy is a framework that enables enterprises to use the right BI tools to analyze the correct data and then report to the right people to aid in making the right decisions. At the same time, enterprises can use the BI strategy to reach various business objectives gradually. These goals include optimizing current business processes, creating top-notch products and services, and becoming a data-driven business.  

How to develop a BI strategy?

There are several steps to follow when developing a business intelligence strategy.

Step 1. Define the current state

A stable business intelligence strategy is the foundation of the current use of business intelligence. To gain the full potential of business intelligence and take your organization to the next level, you need to define simple questions:

• Where are you at the moment?
• What do you want to achieve?
• What is possible?

If there lacks of consensus on the vision among stakeholders, then the BI strategy can not go too far. In particular, there should be a precise alignment between your BI strategy and company strategy.

Step 2. Build a business intelligence roadmap

The business intelligence strategy starts with the plan. Therefore, your next step is to draw a BI roadmap. This is your overall strategy document that outlines your vision, goals, and ways to achieve them. It explains what is in scope, what is not, and the general hierarchy.

There are many stages of BI implementation in any organization, so the project roadmap should include the goals, content, time, and implementation method.

Step 3. Set KPIs and requirements

At this stage, you need to define the core business goals you will achieve with the help of the BI development strategy. 

• What business goal do you want to focus on?
• What indicators can improve your performance and strategy?
• Which KPIs and evaluation indicators define the task as complete?
• Which data sources will be used?

Look at your data source and divide all content into three categories:

• Tracked indicators: data that you will follow regularly but will not be used as performance measures.
• Untracked metrics: data you will not track. However, these data should be available for future analysis.
• KPI (Key Performance Indicator)-the indicator you will use to measure performance. This will be a subset of the metrics you track.

Step 4. Choose a qualified BI tool

You need to evaluate the industry, company size comprehensively, and business needs, conduct market research, and select the appropriate BI tools.

Among the different platform choices, I’d like to recommend FineBI and FineReport the most.

FineReport is honorable mentioned in Gartner 2021 Magic Quadrant for Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms. Using FineReport can accelerate the companies’ development speed and improve the stability of operation of the enterprise. You can download the templates built in the software in FineReport Demo and apply them directly.

Moreover, FineReport is price-friendly to customers. FineReport is free for personal use, and it offers a quote-based plan for enterprises.

FineBI is a modern big data analytics & BI software designed for everyone who has need of data analysis. Everyone of any level can use FineBI to easily establish professional BI dashboards, perform self-service data analysis, gain useful insights and thus drive your business forward.

A great number of enterprises choose to employ Finereport and FineBI at the same time. Through the perfect combination and complementarity of Finereport and FineBI, it is way more easier to meet enterprises’ needs of complex reports and real-time data analysis.

FineBI is a self-service BI tool designed for all employees in the company and especially the data analysts. The operation of FineBI is very simple and clear, focusing on allowing every employee to achieve self-service data analysis. The final reports and data analysis results of are for leaders and management team to make decisions through the analysis results.

FineReport is a reporting tool, suitable for IT staffs or report developers specially set by some enterprises. Other departments can view the reports produced by IT staffs or update the data. The speed of  report production depends on the reporting tool you are using. For example, FineReport uses an excel-like design interface to greatly improve production efficiency and save IT staff a lot of time.

It should be emphasized that these two types of BI have their own advantages, they are not alternatives and they are suitable in different working scenarios, and . They will coexist for a long time for enterprises to choose according to their needs until the basic conditions of informatization change fundamentally. Referring to Gartner’s dual-mode IT model, it is recommended that enterprises should judge which type of BI is more suitable for them, or whether FineReport and FineBI need to be used in combination according to their own data processing maturity and demands. 

If you want know more about the differences between Finereport and FineBI, you can refer to the article: Differences between Finereport and FineBI .

If you want to know more about FineBI and how Finereport and/or FineBI can best suit your needs, you can click the button below and talk to our professional team to get your personalized plan!

Step 5. Create a prototype

This is a short project that validates the technical concept by proposing many simplified functions, verifying hypotheses, testing the functionality of the product, and ensuring that the concept can be implemented or vice versa. In addition, it helps to find the source data, and when the end-user accesses the data, some transformations can be performed to ensure the security of the massive data.

Step 6. Set up a team

The best way to create a team is to gather experts from different departments of the company, who provide specific insights, have different visions, and make architectural, technical, and strategic decisions. Generally, there are five main roles:

• BI Director: the person with business and technical skills who can generate insights and drive the realization of BI.
• BI Engineer: the person who designs, builds, implements, and sets up BI systems.
• Business Analyst: The person who provides expertise in data validation, processing, and visualization to other team members and who translates analysis into actionable insights.
• Data Scientist: A person who uses analytics, statistical tools, and machine learning to extract actionable value from big data.

Business intelligence strategy example

The chosen example in this article is the wonderful application of FineReport. If you are interested, you can click the link to know more about BI examples.

BBK Group is a world-renowned large-scale enterprise group established in China. It creates brands like OPPO, Vivo and OnePlus. Now Its business scope covers a wide range of fields and successes in entering overseas markets.

What did the BI strategy bring to the company?

The company resorts to a business intelligence strategy to solve current problems. BBK Group first determines to choose FineReport as their BI platform. The platform uses Python script processing method to predict the customer flow of the store. It comprehensively considers the indicators such as time, weather, season, temperature, historical customer flow and store operating area to construct the feature project. With the presence of BI visualization, it is easy for the company to figure out customer preferences. Moreover, the platform uses an efficient integrated algorithm to carry its prediction. With this analysis, the company could make clear BI plans and future business strategies.  

The accuracy of the store customer flow forecast has now reached 95%. Moreover, through the process, the company optimizes its current business processes, creates top-notch products and services and becomes a data-driven business.

Conclusion

A stable business intelligence strategy is the foundation of the current use of business intelligence. With the proper BI strategy, companies could take advantage of the market. If you want to use BI strategy to achieve success, remember to compare BI software and choose the suitable one. FineBI could be an awesome option!