How to Successfully Implement Business Intelligence (BI)?

Business Intelligence and modern analytics systems are the business tools and systems used by most business units for effective operations. Increasing business data and ever-changing complex business environments, need business intelligence systems, technologies, and methodologies to make real-time accurate decisions. Cross-dimensional efforts of business intelligence help in analyzing, interpreting, and understanding data, people, processes, and technologies related to business for better operations. Enhanced business functions and operations help in staying ahead of competitors.

New waves of tech applications are implemented by most business operations to make data-based decisions and stay away from future risks. Even though every business has the same challenges in its architecture, the application of BI differs from one business to another. BI provides distinguishing solutions for every business based on its problems and affecting factors. In this article, we discuss – why many businesses fail at implementing business intelligence. And what precautions can be made against it?

  Business Intelligence (BI):

The term business intelligence was first coined by Haward Dresner. He defined BI as a combination of concepts and methods designed to improve strategies to make real-time decisions on factual data. The data systems like Management Information Systems, Decision Support Systems, Executive Information Systems, Human Resource Information Systems, and Management Support Systems are part of business intelligence. And hybrid tech applications like data mining, data visualization, data analytics, and geospatial technology are implied to collect, decode, and analyze factual data.

To understand the significance of BI in a business, let’s consider an example. World-leading beverage giant Coca-Cola advances its sales and delivery operations system with the BI system. Automating the manual reporting system to generate quality reports reduced 260 hrs of work in a year by the employees at the plant. 

Reasons for unsuccessful Business Intelligence initiatives:

There are many reasons why businesses fail at implementing BI as a successful operative system. The below-mentioned are core reasons why businesses fail at operating or leveraging BI before or after initiating its integration with existing systems. 

1. Deploying a business intelligence system without analyzing existing business infrastructure will lead to unsuccessful results. For any business, the primary objective after integrating the BI system is to drive valuable insights. Many businesses forget to automate or upgrade the existing systems and business infrastructure. In the BI system, the information is mainly conveyed between executives and higher authorities for making real-time appropriate decisions that drive business growth. A BI system should be integrated with other systems like salesforce, marketing, business development, win-loss strategies, etc. to optimize the decision support system.

2. The extension to the above-mentioned point, the business in the race of deploying BI forgets or overrides the decisions related to internal infrastructure development. Before implementing a system, if the business doesn’t have skilled workers to work on the newly deployed systems, it should concentrate on recruiting and training. Or else the investments go into the trash and result in failure because of unskilled workers.

3. IT-driven Business Intelligence is the next mistake committed by most business owners. As it is a tech-driven intelligent system, most of the executives assume IT professionals can handle it better for optimized operations. In a real sense to leverage this technology, real-time data should be provided. The data should include information regarding annual reports from various departments, growth analyzing factors, product life cycle data, business functions, operations data, etc. Hence, a human with complete knowledge of existing business should help in developing the system architecture for effective results.

4. Acceptance of BI technology at various departments and different levels of business for effective operations. The system is mostly used by the top management, the higher executives should afford their time and knowledge in making it a more successful investment, even though information from every level of the hierarchy is important and it affects decisions on a large scale. Every individual connected with the business should be integrated and communicated throughout the BI product development and deployment processes.

5. Data-driven BI is ineffectual until every person connected to its deployment has in-depth knowledge about it. After activating BI systems most business lacks internal communication between management and executives, which leads to complex problems in implementing particular decisions. 

6. Unfortunately, many BI systems are not built to evolve, they are built to solve challenges that existed during implementation. For instance, A BI system built to solve an existing problem cannot automate and diagnose insights related to a new problem and provide dynamic solutions. Hence, the business has to develop newer versions of BI systems to accommodate the new challenges. Hence BI cannot pivot. Business before considering the implementation of BI should classify their current and future problems and goals in prior.

7. The implementation of business intelligence in a business delivers actionable quick insights that optimize the core values of the business for better revenue systems. In this article, we mentioned the errors that are committed by most businesses in deploying this technology. To overcome these barriers, the business should consider the above-mentioned errors as prior experiences before and after integrating BI technology for expected results.

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