february 3, 2023
Four steps to getting started with BI
Here’s what you need to do to get started with BI, and build a BI system that serves you.
Here’s what you need to do to get started with BI, and build a BI system that serves you.
Understand what data you need
BI is all about data that can be relevant for your needs. In order to build that data, you need to assess just how much data you have access to, and which data you think is useful for BI to analyse it.
Think about these key questions: What is your organisation trying to achieve?
What are the short term, long term, low level or high level business objectives that you are aiming for? Once you establish what they are, you can create measurable means of tracking your progress in the form of KPIs. You can then start thinking about data lists you might need to track them. If you are unsure how you compare to other competitors in the industry, you might want to use external data sources so you can benchmark against them.
Find and access the data you need
You need to identify and access your data sources. If it’s a secondary data, such as revenue targets and sales figures, you need to have access to it and only feed relevant data to BI.
As mentioned earlier, if you’ve got other sources, such as data that has been purchased from external data lists for example, you also need to acquire it.
Build the roadmap
A BI roadmap is your plan on how BI will be used across your business, and what it will do, in order to improve efficiency and maximise performance. It’s often viewed as taking the high-level objective in the first step and building out a KPI framework from the data in step two.
Find or hire the right BI team
As much as people like to say how simple it is to build a BI system or gather data, there are a million variables that might cause BI system to record the wrong data or present it in the wrong way. So you might want to consider hiring a dedicated team, as BI teams are responsible for making sure the data is correct, analysing data, and helping BI to visualise that data to help you make better business decisions.
