Unit VI

BI Maturity, Strategy and Modern Trends in BI

Business Intelligence (BI) maturity model

Many different models help determine the potential of companies and

categorise them based on their current solutions. We can distinguish
ten or even more such models, but I will focus on the BI maturity
model prepared by Gartner.
Using that model we can distinguish five different business
intelligence (BI) maturity levels:

Level 1: Unaware
This is often described as a basic level. Companies at this level highly
rely on their intuition. They apply some ad-hoc analysis that is mostly
based on personal data extracts. There are no formal processes,
procedures, nor practices prepared to support BI.

Level 2: Opportunistic

There are some business intelligence solutions implemented, available

only for limited users. They are scattered across the company and
work as stand-alone projects. Individual departments prepare data for
their own needs, but databases or data marts that help to make use of
the capabilities of BI tools.

Level 3: Standard

At this level, technology standards start to emerge, and some process

assumptions are implemented in the entire organization. Generated is
consistent- there are reports, dashboards, analyses, and conclusions
that are shared among different departments. Business Intelligence
Competency Center (BICC) also starts at this level – it’s a cross-
functional group of people responsible for organised and effective use
of business intelligence solution across the entire organization.

Level 4: Enterprise

Implemented BI solution is mature and intensively used to support the

decision-making process. Selected tools, business intelligence, and
analytics tools are consistent across all employees, from analytics to
senior management. Business Intelligence Competency Center is
replaced by the improved and more important Analytics Center of
Excellence (ACE).
Level 5: Transformative

The Highest level of Business Intelligence maturity – data and

analysis (D&A) is a central business strategy. There’s a general trust
in received data, and all the information is used to generate maximum
potential – increase sales, effectiveness, and reduce costs.
Transformational technologies, such as artificial intelligence, are in
use to reach business goals and help in the decision-making process.
A business intelligence strategy is a blueprint that enables
businesses to measure their performance, find competitive
advantages, and use data mining and statistics to steer the business
towards success.

Every company has been generating data for a while now. The
question is, what are you doing with it? Here are the five steps you
should follow when building a data strategy.

1 Find out where you are (so you’ll know where to go)

Our go-to approach for analytics that feeds well into a BI strategy is
the Evolution of Analytics chart (below). Originating with Gartner,
this chart includes the analytic features needed for a full analytics
strategy, and what our AI team believe to be the absolute future of
analytics – Cognitive Analytics.

n order to know where to go, you must first find yourself on this
chart. Most companies find themselves in the bottom left corner, in
the Descriptive Analytics and Diagnostic Analytics sections. You
likely already have some form of scheduled reports, are drilling down
into your data, discovering what is in your data, and may even be
visualizing to some extent. But as you can see from this chart, there is
so much more you can be doing … and it’s easy to get there with the
right business intelligence strategy.

#2 Plan your objectives (and map the supporting data)

At this stage, you will need to plan your business goal. It may be an
oxymoron, but with so much data out there, the more focused you are
in planning your business goals, the better off you’re going to be.
Essentially, your data needs to address a business question or a
business need. Do you want to be more efficient? Find a bottleneck in
R&D? Share knowledge with customers? Add value to your
solution?

With a goal of getting to the end of the chart with predictive and
prescriptive analytics, you can ask questions like: Are we going to hit
our targets by the end of the year? What is the market segment we
should focus on? Is there a bundle of products we should suggest
based on our historical performance? What are the main contributors
to close a deal? And is there a set of different elements we should
combine and/or follow to make a bigger impact in the market?

When working with customers we’ve found that a good place to start
is with finance and sales data. Uncovering insights in this key area
can make a major impact on the growth of the company. Let’s take
revenue growth, for example. In order to analyze revenue growth, you
will first need all of the sales information related to revenue. This
information may come from Salesforce, or from your ERP system like
Oracle, as well as from any other marketing technology that may hold
customer experience information.

Bigger companies have complicated tech stacks with multiple

touchpoints that are collecting piles and piles of customer data that
needs to be evaluated to see which technologies are relevant to this
specific objective. Again, the granular focus on your objective here
will help define which datasets you need for this objective.

Also, keep in mind which types of data are missing as that may be
critical in putting together the bigger picture and may prevent you
from reaching the predictive analytics stage and the future of your BI
strategy.
The end result of this step should be a set of KPIs that support your
objective, and a clear map of the data sources you will need to
analyze and visualize these KPIs.

#3 Define how the data will be shared (and how it will be

distributed)

Before you start executing on the plan, there is one very important
question that needs to be answered.

How are you going to release the solution?

I know, this seems like an obvious question, but when so much data is
concerned, this is one of the most critical items to be defined in your
strategy. There are two basic strategies that your company can take:

A Decentralized Approach

Some organizations empower its end users with interactive

dashboards. This is where the term citizen data scientist comes into
play. Citizen data scientists do not need to be data scientists, they just
need to know their way around the data, and that begins with giving
them access to more than just a dashboard. These are the employees
you’d consider power users. They’re the ones that are defining what is
needed in the department and need the insights to make decisions. In
large enterprise organizations, this scenario can free up bottlenecks
with IT and data teams, enabling departments to do a lot of the data
analysis on their own.

A Centralized Approach

On the flip side, we have organizations that have decided to be in

complete control of the data that is distributed, including who sees
what, and how much of it they can touch. Take Nasdaq for instance.
Their BI strategy took into consideration their sensitive data, huge
distribution channels, and the need for better governance to reach one
version of the truth. Building on this strategy, Nasdaq provides its
customers with dashboards, but it does not provide them with the
ability to work directly on the data models. There is a certain amount
of drill-down that each customer can perform to see more details, but
the data is strictly governed with system level, object level, data level,
and row-level security.

#4 Deliver your solution (and focus your efforts)

You may think it’s too early to think about, but part of your BI
strategy needs to be how you’ll deliver the solution to your end-users,
or your entire company.

Some of this may come naturally with the decision on how you will
share data. For instance, for a centralized approach (where the user
has no room for adjustments) you will need to put more effort into
training and documentation. For a decentralized solution, you may
want to do short release cycles, asking for feedback on each release,
and then incorporate that feedback into the next release.

By outlining the delivery method in your BI strategy, you can plan

how you want to focus your efforts. Do you need to work on creating
more data governance or put more effort on training and
documentation?

#5 Find the roadblocks (and push through them)

Now that you have a clear idea of what kind of questions you need to
ask, and what kind of data you need to support that, you will now
need to understand who are the gatekeepers in this scenario. The
gatekeeper in this situation is basically who or what is standing in the
way between you and the data.

Your data can be stored in a database or may even be located with a

third party vendor. If you are outsourcing HR services to a company
that is managing your hiring pipeline, or if you have cloud-based
service providers like Marketo for managing marketing campaigns or
Quickbooks for financial services, then you will need to plan how to
connect to their data and learn about its structure in order to use it
properly.

For some third-party applications, there may be a simple API that can
be used to import the data. For the IT department, it may be just the
manager’s permission and a couple of signatures that you will need to
find in order to access the data. This all takes time and resources that
need to be allocated inside your BI strategy.

The Top 10 Challenges In Business Intelligence

1) Too expensive and hard to justify the ROI of BI
Budgets and resources are tight everywhere but especially for small
businesses. The price of deploying BI is a primary concern among
small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). SMEs are discouraged
by the prohibitive costs of acquiring the right software. Also, limited
resources make looking for qualified professionals such as data
science experts, IT infrastructure professionals and consulting
analysts impractical and worrisome. These deterrents are compounded
by worries about expensive infrastructure investments needed to
deploy BI software. In the past, expensive enterprise BI solutions
required huge hardware resources. In addition to increasing the price
of deployment, setting up these data warehouses and processors also
impacted expensive IT labor resources.

With the rise of self-service analytics through BI platforms, the cost

doesn’t have to be a business intelligence challenge. The renowned
specialist, Mike Ferguson, has seen how these tools are helping
entrepreneurs and eliminating the need for expensive IT support.
“There is no doubt that today, self service BI tools have well and truly
taken root in many business areas with business analysts now in
control of building their own reports and dashboards rather than
waiting on IT to develop everything for them.”
Entrepreneurs are turning to business intelligence to improve
operational efficiency and save money. They also need these tools to
generate a true ROI.

2) Lack of company-wide adoption

Disjointed BI practices and failed universal adoption is a key business
intelligence challenge. It’s essential to gain buy-in from all
stakeholders early on in the process to get everyone on the same page.
To do this, you’ll want to develop a set of business requirements and
goals. Don’t develop these in a vacuum or just at the executive level.
Consult with key stakeholders, including IT, finance, marketing,
sales, and operations. Clear objectives and predetermined Key
Performance Indicators will help guide a successful BI adoption.
Although there are various KPI examples, you should choose only the
best fit for your department or industry.

There may be push back. At a small business, a data culture may not
exist yet. Departments may be discouraged by a lack of time, data
acumen and resources and shy away from encouraging enterprise
adoption of BI. They may not see that the adoption costs outweigh the
benefits.

They need to see a cloud-based enterprise-wide BI tool in action. The

right tool will benefit teams across an organization. These tools allow
for a wide range of users to easily connect to, interact with, visualize
and communicate their data. Easy drag and drop interfaces require
little training and no prior data analysis or SQL skills. Entrepreneurs
don’t have to worry about stretching limited staffing resources with
extensive training and certifications.

The right BI software can deliver insightful and actionable

information without needing a data scientist to collect, prepare and
analyze complex data and process it into reports management can
understand. Empowering staff across a small business with
dashboards they can immediately use encourages adoption and
ensures BI success.
3) Analyzing data from different data sources
In a survey conducted by Matillion, 27.4% of the responding
businesses stated that reporting/analyzing across multiple systems or
data sources was their biggest challenge. Odds are your organization,
no matter the size, is collecting data surrounding their business
operations. The problem is this data is often spread across a variety of
different systems and software. Data may be stored in various ERP
systems, CRMs, databases and Excel spreadsheets. With data spread
across multiple systems, getting the information you need can be an
arduous task.

Entrepreneurs are turning to innovative BI tools to address this

business intelligence problem. These tools can easily merge different
data sets on the fly without the need of restructuring databases or
setting up a data warehouse. This allows small businesses to connect
all their data sources with the help of data connectors, and see beyond
the numbers, discover new relationships and detect trends to take the
guesswork out of important business decisions.

4) Businesses aren’t measuring the right indicators

Organizations are quick to measure financial KPIs, but unfortunately,
they often stop there. While these metrics are important, they are
often measured at the end of the year or quarter and are fairly reactive
in nature. Once again, they are crucial to measure and report on but
SMEs should be monitoring more. This is where a comprehensive BI
plan contributes to an organization’s success. It is important that a
wide range of appropriate KPIs are used to measure progress and
performance. This data can be used to benchmark internally or across
departments/offices. The data can also be used externally to compare
a company’s performance against others in the industry.

An online KPI dashboard software takes the heavy lifting off of

SME’s limited resources. The software enables entrepreneurs to
visualize and share their numbers according to their own individual
needs.
5) Delivering mobile-based BI is no easy feat
We live in a mobile age. With more mobile devices in the world than
human beings, gone are the days when producing work, planning,
sharing information, or collaborating on projects was reduced to
meeting rooms or desktop PCs alone.

Our hyper-connected shift into the mobile age means that there’s
never been more demand for mobile-based BI solutions. But with
business intelligence-based demand come business intelligence
problems.

In a fast-paced, cutthroat digital landscape, business leaders must be

able to obtain access to data-driven reports and insights 24/7. While
developing mobile-optimized BI solutions can prove a developmental
challenge, by working with the right interactive business intelligence
platform, it’s possible to log in and pull invaluable insights from
mobile devices wherever you are in the world without losing any key
features or functionality.

Your mobile-based business intelligence problems, solved.

6) Providing true self-service analytics

One of the biggest BI challenges that today’s businesses face is
reaping the benefits of genuine self-service data analytics solutions.

In their infancy, BI-based data solutions were difficult to navigate and

only accessible to those with advanced technical knowledge. This
most pressing of BI issues meant that the process of extracting
actionable insights from your data would be sluggish and fragmented,
with information being passed down a delivery line before arriving at
your inbox.

Advancements in interactive BI dashboard tools mean that you can

access critical insights on a multitude of mobile devices. Today’s best
solutions are intuitive, visual, and easy to master, which means that
you won’t need to rely on anyone else within the organization to
 engage with the kind of information that will help your empire
flourish.

7) Dealing with the impact of poor data quality

It’s true that we live in the Age of Information, with more data
generated in recent years than the rest of history. But while we’re
swimming in data, with this raft of insight comes saturation.

There’s so much data available in today’s digital world that sifting

through it and mining for the golden information that will help you
enhance the success of your business is one of today’s most difficult
business intelligence issues.

There are 2 glaring issues with our modern data glut relating to BI:

 Important data being buried deep into systems, applications, and

platforms, getting lost or missed as a result.

 BI-centric systems and sources delivering poor, inaccurate, and

convoluted data-driven insights that ultimately waste time and money
while stunning progress.

To ensure you avoid detrimental data, you need to have strategies in

place to promote quality control throughout the organization.

In addition to working with dynamic KPIs that align with specific

needs, goals, and initiatives within your business, you should also
adopt a data quality management (DQM) approach and encourage
others within the business to follow suit.

8) Lacking a clearly defined BI strategy

One of the most overlooked business intelligence challenges facing
today’s entrepreneurs or business leaders is the fact that despite the
access to a wealth of quality venture-boosting data, there is a severe
lack of strategy behind these insights. While this is better than ‘going
with your gut’ alone, without a clearly defined data-driven strategy,
you are still shooting in the dark.
Working with powerful BI dashboards that promote interactive data
visualization, you should develop a strategic roadmap to help give
your data direction, fluidity, and add value throughout the
organization.

Any solid BI roadmap starts with examining your existing processes

as well as defining your key information stakeholders, and it ends
with choosing the best tool for the job. To steer you through the
process, here’s our 11-step business intelligence strategy guide.

9) Poor BI functionality & interactivity

As mentioned, interactive data dashboards come with a host of built-
in features and functions that make extracting insights from your data
swift, simple, and effective, thus overcoming one of the most
common BI problems of sluggish data sharing processes.

Many businesses face this issue as people need to collect, curate, and
analyze data from a number of sources, often from platforms or
programs that are incredibly manual and lack interactivity. More often
than not, poor processes and functionality lead to inaccuracies,
inefficiencies, and costly mistakes that can potentially stunt the
growth of the business.

By working with interactive BI dashboards, you’ll be able to move

beyond the likes of Excel, PowerPoint, and other static reporting
tools and instead gain access to intuitive, interactive visual data that
will help you achieve the results you deserve.

10) Sluggish query and database performance

Finally, we move onto our tenth and perhaps most irritating of
business intelligence issues: sluggish query or database performance.

One of the most widely-reported BI challenges to date, slow database

performance leads to a number of internal challenges, including
business intelligence security issues, fragmented processes, poor
interdepartmental communication, and severe reporting lags.
Naturally, none of these issues are good for business.

Regardless of your niche or sector, time correlates with money –

which means that poor query performance or sluggish database
responses will cost you dearly over time.

To drive efficiency and overcome this common BI challenge, it’s

important to not only quality-control your data and prepare it
thoroughly for analysis but also centralize your most valuable insights
for swift, cohesive data analysis.

Success Factors For A Business Intelligence Implementation

These 8 critical success factors can help to ensure that your business
intelligence implementation is completed on time, on budget, and
delivers a stellar ROI—while also delighting your users.

1. Don’t boil the ocean.

With many enterprise software projects, there’s an “all or nothing”

mentality which leads to high costs, long timescales, and unwieldy
user requirements, which have often changed by the time the
technology is delivered. But with a business intelligence
implementation it doesn’t have to be like this. In fact, it actively
shouldn’t be. Select an area of the business to focus on—for instance,
one with the most to gain from delivering improved reporting, and
with the biggest data analysis problems today. This might be a
functional area like Sales, Supply Chain, Finance or Operations.
Deliver this area first and fast. Gain momentum and credibility. Then
take your ‘lessons learned’ into the next area of your business, and
start there.

2. Focus on ease of use.

The audience with the most to gain from a successful business

intelligence implementation is the business user. But others will
benefit too: IT will no longer have to produce/amend reports for
business users, for instance, and Finance won’t have to manually
produce Excel spreadsheets any more. But these all rely on the
business user being able to “self-serve”. And business users like
things really simple. An easy-to-use front end, devoid of technical
terms, table names, and SQL syntax, is critical to ensuring a
successful business intelligence implementation. Choose a simple-to-
use tool. Include a glossary of fields, measures and terms using the
familiar nomenclature that the user already understands. Have
explanations— built into the software—of what data means and
where it came from. Finally, ensure that your delivery platform is one
that the user is comfortable with—which today almost certainly
means a browser.

3. Performance is key.

While it may have previously taken a whole day to produce a report,

the reality is that any delay at all will still annoy users. This will hit
your user satisfaction ratings, and in turn, impact the success of your
business intelligence implementation—thereby killing adoption. In a
world where a web search for ‘business intelligence implementation’
returns 41,400,000 results in 0.38 seconds, your users just don’t want
to wait. And they don’t have to. Use modern technology like in-
memory analytics, columnar databases, SSD disks and advanced
caching to deliver blistering, sub-second performances over millions
of rows of data—and ensure your users will love you forever!

4. Pick your technology carefully.

There are many ways of tackling business intelligence and self-

service reporting, and many different technology options. Pick yours
carefully, and don’t necessarily just go for the one that comes bundled
with your existing software packages. While products may have the
same badge, they are usually just separately packaged BI tools that
require separate implementation. With that in mind it makes sense to
evaluate them in their own right, and against alternatives which may
better suit your requirements, skill-levels and budgets.

5. Understand where the cost is.

Evaluating the cost of a business intelligence implementation is
usually an ‘iceberg model’ exercise. The software licence spend
usually represents about 20% of the overall cost (the visible part of
the iceberg). But a further 80% (the part invisible from the surface)
will need to be spent on consultancy, hardware, ancillary software
(databases, operating systems etc.) and training. Usually about 40% of
the total project cost will then be required annually to maintain it all.
So a £40k business intelligence software cost can easily expand to a
£200k total project cost, and a £80k per annum running cost. There
are exceptions to this rule, of course.

Usually, most of the cost of a business intelligence implementation is

below the surface

Matillion‘s business-intelligence-as-a-service model, for instance,

wraps the entire cost into a one-off fixed price setup and a monthly
subscription fee—no hardware, software, or further consultancy
required. But most BI software is not like this, so understand where
the cost is before you begin.

6. Nominate advocates.

At Matillion, we believe that one of the best things that we do as part

of our business intelligence implementations is to identify and work
with advocates. These are domain experts who understand the
reporting requirements in the business. Often, they’re the very people
who beforehand had been hand-cranking management reports using
Excel. They have a lot to gain from BI, so they’ll be on your side.
They help to get the reporting requirements right, and can test and
reconcile numbers. Once the business intelligence implementation is
complete, they become your ‘super-users’, promoting BI use, and
helping others.

7. Reconcile, reconcile, reconcile.

The best way to instantly kill your business intelligence

implementation is to deliver numbers that—in your users’
eyes—don’t add up. They’ll use the system once, lose trust in it, and
never log-in again. To avoid this, ensure you reconcile numbers
carefully back to trusted sources. Where calculations are included,
explain these calculations to the user (ideally through the user
interface itself e.g. with a ‘tool-tip’) so they know and understand
what they’re looking at.

8. Ensure executive involvement.

At Matillion, we can usually tell at the beginning of an

implementation exactly how well it’s going to go, purely by the level
of executive involvement. Quite simply, business intelligence
implementations with a high level of line-of-business-executive
involvement invariably work better and faster than those without.

# What is a Business Intelligence Framework?

A Business Intelligence Framework is, as the name implies, a
framework that seamlessly connects the various elements of a
business: organizational roles, KPIs, authorization, and visualization.
This helps you implement Business Intelligence plans both easier and
faster.

Why do you need a framework?

Passionned Group’s BI framework registers which information or
insight each organizational role needs in which form, and at which
moment in the production process. In other words, the relevant
information, effortlessly available to whoever needs it, at any given
time. 100% current, interactive, and fast. Users no longer need to
struggle with complex file structures or click through myriad tabs
looking for the right report or dashboard.

The five key points of our framework

1. Many possibilities for reuse due to object orientation and
inheritance.
2. Very user-friendly and easy to use thanks to a standardized User
eXperience (UX).
3. Device-neutral, so you can use it using a portal, desktop,
smartphone, or tablet.
4. Highly flexible due to being based on concrete organizational
roles.
5. 100% independent from BI vendors and tools.

What are the advantages of working with a BI framework?

What’s the fastest and most cost-effective way to implement your
Business Analytics? The answer is: a good BI architecture and a BI
framework. Much has been written about architecture, but BI
framework deserves just as much attention, because it carries so many
advantages. Frameworks aren’t concerned with the data layer, that’s
the domain of the data warehouse architecture. They’re concerned
with the presentation layer of BI that also determines authorizations.
In that layer, you can gain a lot of efficiency, because countless
reports use almost identical graphs and tables, but don’t come from
the same place. They were copy-and-pasted to life, leading a
zombified life of their own and becoming difficult to maintain. Sound
familiar?

# BI implementation target
Importance of Business Intelligence

A highly personalized, customer-driven, and digital-first approach has

resulted in a new-age business approach, which requires a business
analysis with defined metrics.

Hence having a business intelligence strategy has become a necessity

for organizations.

Business intelligence, if properly applied, can give you an accurate

analysis that can help you to accelerate & grow your business.
It can help you to understand the customer acquisition cost, customer
buying patterns & cycles, and help you to make the decisions based
on the analysis.

A proper business intelligence implementation will not only help you

understand more about your customers, but it will also help you to
increase your sales by many folds.

So, what are the steps that can lead to a successful business
implementation strategy? Let’s take a look at the key steps for
business intelligence implementation.

Business Intelligence Implementation Steps

1. Educate the Staff & Stakeholders
2. Define the Objectives
3. Set the Key Point Indicators
4. Form a Team
5. Find out the best software
6. Create the Execution Strategy
7. Define the tasks & Delegate the Resources
8. Create the Data Cleansing, Data Processing, Data Analysis
Process
9. Implement the Process as a Proof of Concept or a Pilot
10. Implement the changes to meet the KPIs
Educate the Staff & Stakeholders

It’s a human tendency to resist the change, and the first step to
minimize the resistance is through education.

Educating the staff & stakeholders alike requires a lot of effort as it

requires a significant amount of expenditure from the stakeholders’
perspective and switching to new technology from the staff’s
perspective.

You need to educate the stakeholders and the staff on how the
business intelligence implementation will benefit the individuals and
also the organization.
Also, you need to have a clear plan on how you are going to achieve
the objectives through the BI system.

Define the Objectives

The second step in a successful business intelligence implementation

is to clearly define the objectives you seek to achieve through the
business intelligence system.

Having laid out objectives will not only help your stakeholders to
understand the expectations from the tool, but it will also help you to
strategize the plan of action easily.

Set the Key Performance Indicators

Once you have defined the objectives to implement the business

intelligence system, the next step is to define the key performance
indicators (KPIs) clearly.

They will help you to make effective decisions to achieve your

objectives. These indicators should be measurable, in-line with your
objectives, and the key to achieving your goals.

So for example, if you want to increase your revenue by 20% over the
next quarter through BI, you need to set KPIs like number of
inquiries, the number of POC signups and the number of leads in the
sales funnel and their respective stages in the funnel.

Setting up the engagement metrics related KPIs like the number of

likes to your page, or the number of retweets of your posts will not
help you to achieve your goal, which is to increase the revenue by
20% over the next two quarters.

Form a Team

The next step in this plan is to form a team of people who will
perform tasks like data cleansing, data input, data processing, and data
analytics.
This is one of the most important steps in a successful BI
implementation as this team will be executing the ideas.

Find out the best software

The next important step in the process of business intelligence

implementation is to find out the optimal software for each task. You
also need to find out alternative software for each task.

For example, you may want to use OpenRefine, or Trifacta Wrangler

based on your requirements for the data cleansing process.

Similarly, you may want to use Flink or Pentaho for data processing
purposes. Also, you need to define the BI analytics tool(s) you are
planning to use in the future. The popular BI tools include IBM
Cognos, Power BI, Tibco, Tableau, etc.

The selection of tools will vary upon the requirement and budget. But,
you need to understand the optimal tool for each process.

Create the Execution Strategy

Once you have a team, resources, and software in place, you need to
focus on the execution strategy for a successful business intelligence
implementation process.

The execution strategy involves determining whether you want a Top-

Down Approach which is more of a strategic approach or a Bottom-
Up Approach which is more of a tactical approach.

In the Top-Down approach, you identify the goals first and then
communicate with the team how those goals will be measured.

In this approach, the goals and key metrics are defined, but the
methods to achieve them aren’t necessarily explained.

But, in the case of the Bottom-Up Approach, you identify the business
problem and go for a solution for that particular problem to achieve
the goals for that particular entity.
According to Enterprise BI Architect Kay Van De Venter, Bottom-up
approach is like building a room at a time in the house when you have
the overall idea of how the house will look like.

Define the tasks & Delegate the Resources

Once you have formed a team, software, and the strategic execution
approach then you need to define the tasks which the teams will
execute.

And then, you need to delegate the tasks to the respective teams and
allocate the resources to fulfill the task.

Create the Data Cleansing, Data Processing, Data Analysis

Process

Now that you have all the tools, strategy, and the team in place, you
need to create a data cleansing process with the chosen tool(s).

There is a huge amount of data that lacks the quality to achieve your
goals, and you need to clear out this ineffective database and create a
database with high quality.

You also need to ensure that there are checkpoints to evaluate the data
quality at the set intervals. Having an effective data cleansing process
enhances your chances of achieving your goals.

Similarly, once you have clean data, you need to create data
processing techniques. It involves creating a roadmap for data
processing and improving the quality of the responses and query
resolution time.

Then, you need to integrate the BI analytics tools like Power BI,
Cognos, or Tableau to understand the user behavior insights.

Implement the Process as a Proof of Concept or a Pilot

Once you have these processes ready, you need to implement them
for a single process as a proof of concept or a pilot.
Once you have sufficient data to understand the impact of BI on your
business., then this strategy will help you analyze whether you are
meeting the KPIs, or if you are lagging behind them.

If you are lagging behind the pre-defined KPIs, you need to

understand the reasons behind it. And then again you need to modify
and optimize your strategy to achieve those KPIs.

Implement the changes to meet the KPIs

Now that you have implemented the changes based on the insights
received from the pilot; run another pilot to understand how much of
the gap you have covered between these two pilot runs.

This is a continual process, and it needs optimization at every stage.

We recommend that once you have a couple of pilots and their results
with you, you can go for a phased implementation approach across all
the other processes.

# Open Source BI

1. BIRT
BIRT is open source BI software that can be used to create data
visualizations and reports, which can all be embedded into web
applications. The main components are a visual report designer, a
runtime component for generating designs, and a charting engine. The
platform has more than 12 million downloads as well as a community
center at the BIRT Developer Center.

2. ClicData
ClicData offers ClicData Personal, a free version of their dashboard
software that provides 1 GB of data storage with an unlimited number
of dashboards for a single user. The premium version allows for a
greater number of data connectors, automated data refreshes, and
multi-user with advanced sharing capabilities.

3. The ELK Stack

The open source ELK Stack is commonly used to centralize streams
of data then visualize the information in real-time, monitoring
dashboards (such as this one for Salesforce dashboards).

More on the subject:

o Become a Kibana Search Expert (Part 2)

o Why We Founded Logz.io
o Get Started with ELK and Logz io - Shipping, Analyzing
and Visualizing Your Logs

We at Logz.io have created an AI-powered log analysis platform

that offers ELK as an enterprise-grade cloud service with machine
learning technology.

4. Helical Insight
Helical Insight is an open source BI framework that provides e-mail
scheduling, visualization, exporting, multi-tenancy, user role
management along with an API-driven framework that allows users to
add any additional functionality that they may need. The Instant BI
feature lets people type questions in a Google-like interface and
receive the relevant reports and charts.
5. Jedox

Jedox provides powerful planning and beautiful reporting on every

desktop and mobile device. The platform aims to eliminate the
headaches of Excel by providing a rich, interactive experience with
real-time modeling. The cloud and premium on-premise versions have
14- and 30-day trials, respectively.

6. JasperReports Server
JasperReports Server provides reporting and analytics that can be
embedded into a web or mobile application as well as serve as a
repository of information that can be delivered on a real-time or
scheduled basis. This open source software can also manage
Jaspersoft paid BI reporting and analytics platform.

7. KNIME
KNIME is an open source platform for data analysis that comes with
more than 1,000 modules, hundreds of ready-to-run example analyses,
a set of tools that is integrated into the software, and a lengthy
selection of algorithms that users can chose to incorporate. KNIME is
used by data scientists and BI executives.

8. Pentaho

The Pentaho Reporting platform is a suite of the company’s open

source reporting tools that lets users create historical data reports in
PDF, Excel, HTML, text, rich-text file, XML, and CSV formats. The
computer-generated reports can take data from multiple sources and
make it easier to understand.
9. Microsoft Power BI

Microsoft Power BI offers a free version of the platform with a 1 GB

per user data capacity limit and once-per-day data-refresh schedule.
Power BI’s dashboards can present insights from Salesforce, Google
Analytics, and other platforms on desktop and mobile devices. Users
can also query the software with natural language (in other words,
plain English).

10. RapidMiner

RapidMiner allows data scientists to build a complete analytical

workflow in data science and business intelligence projects, allowing
them to do data preparation, modeling, and deployment in a single
environment. The platform is supported by a community of 250,000
data science experts. RapidMiner has a free tier, and premium plans
start at $2,500 per year.

11. ReportServer
ReportServer integrates various BI reporting engines into a single user
interface with the goal of allowing people to use the right analytics
tool for the right purpose at the right time. There is a free community
tier as well as an enterprise one, and the software’s Dynamic List
feature allows for the ad-hoc generation of list-like reports.

12. Seal Report

Seal Report is an open source framework that can produce reports and
dashboards based on the information in a database. Features include
native pivot tables, charting in either HTML 5 or Microsoft formats,
web report servers, and dynamic SQL sources. Users can also
schedule report generations in advance and generate them in folders
or send them over e-mail.

13. SpagoBI / Knowage

SpagoBI is an open source business intelligence suite that includes
reporting, charting, and data-mining tools. It is developed by the Open
Source Competency Center of Engineering Group, a large Italian
software and services company that also offers professional services
such as user support, maintenance, consultancy, and training.

The team behind SpagoBI now uses the Knowage brand.

14. SQL Power Wabit

In 2008, SQL Power Group open-sourced Wabit, which provides a

single framework for all ad-hoc queries and OLAP analyses that
works with almost any database platform. Wabit’s drag-and-drop
interface can also tap into streaming data to create real-time
dashboards. The community edition is free to deploy.

15. Tableau Public

Tableau Public is free BI software that allows people to create
interactive charts and live dashboards and then publish them on the
Internet, embed them on a website, or share them on social media.
Material can also be customized for display on desktop, tablet, or
mobile devices. Tableau also connects to Google Sheets, and data can
be auto-refreshed once per day.

16. Zoho Reports

Zoho’s BI platform, Zoho Reports, can connect to almost any data

source and then create visual reports and dashboards for analysis. The
software also has an analytics engine that has the ability to process
hundreds of millions of records and return relevant insights within
seconds. The free version allows for two users.
17. Metabase

Metabase BI Starting Dashboard

Metabase is an SQL-based interface equipped with a GUI query

builder with use cases applying to streaming data (including music
streams), security investigations, fraud prevention and onboarding.
Many of their users apply it to data warehouses for microservices and
even the lifecycle of software development.

18. A Reporting Tool

A Reporting Tool (ART) is a lightweight Java-based system that can

be used in any modern browser (but the system must have Java
downloaded and running). It purports to quickly deploy SQL query
results. It was released in 2013 but started seeing major upgrades in
late 2017.

2020 updates include jdbc drivers for MongoDB and JSON files.
Other features include drill down reports, alerts, dynamic data sources
and dynamic job recipients, as well as several language versions.

# What is Data?

The quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are

performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in the
form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical, or
mechanical recording media.
A database is a collection of information that is organized so that it can be easily accessed,
managed and updated. Computer databases typically contain aggregations of data records
or files, containing information about sales transactions or interactions with specific
customers.

What is Big Data?

Big Data is a collection of data that is huge in volume, yet growing

exponentially with time. It is a data with so large size and complexity
that none of traditional data management tools can store it or process
it efficiently. Big data is also a data but with huge size.
In this tutorial, you will learn,

 What is Data?
 What is Big Data?
 Examples Of Big Data
 Types Of Big Data
 Characteristics Of Big Data
 Advantages Of Big Data Processing

Examples Of Big Data

Following are some of the Big Data examples-

The New York Stock Exchange generates about one terabyte of new
trade data per day.

Social Media

The statistic shows that 500+terabytes of new data get ingested into
the databases of social media site Facebook, every day. This data is
mainly generated in terms of photo and video uploads, message
exchanges, putting comments etc.

A single Jet engine can generate 10+terabytes of data in 30

minutes of flight time. With many thousand flights per day,
generation of data reaches up to many Petabytes.
 Big data has made once-holistic concepts, such as “what consumers want,” more
measurable. It has facilitated inductive reasoning, a controversial data-
first inversion of the scientific method. At many companies, it has ushered in
a “culture of analytics” in which even non-tech employees both input data and
have access to data-driven insights.

REAL WORLD BIG DATA EXAMPLES

 Discovering consumer shopping habits
 Personalized marketing
 Fuel optimization tools for the transportation industry
 Monitoring health conditions through data from wearables
 Live road mapping for autonomous vehicles
 Streamlined media streaming
 Predictive inventory ordering
 Personalized health plans for cancer patients
 Real-time data monitoring and cybersecurity protocols

Types Of Big Data

Following are the types of Big Data:

1. Structured
2. Unstructured
3. Semi-structured

Structured

Any data that can be stored, accessed and processed in the form of
fixed format is termed as a 'structured' data. Over the period of time,
talent in computer science has achieved greater success in developing
techniques for working with such kind of data (where the format is
well known in advance) and also deriving value out of it. However,
nowadays, we are foreseeing issues when a size of such data grows to
a huge extent, typical sizes are being in the rage of multiple
zettabytes.

Unstructured

Any data with unknown form or the structure is classified as

unstructured data. In addition to the size being huge, un-structured
data poses multiple challenges in terms of its processing for deriving
value out of it. A typical example of unstructured data is a
heterogeneous data source containing a combination of simple text
files, images, videos etc. Now day organizations have wealth of data
available with them but unfortunately, they don't know how to derive
value out of it since this data is in its raw form or unstructured format.

Semi-structured

Semi-structured data can contain both the forms of data. We can see
semi-structured data as a structured in form but it is actually not
defined with e.g. a table definition in relational DBMS. Example of
semi-structured data is a data represented in an XML file.

Characteristics Of Big Data

Big data can be described by the following characteristics:

 Volume
 Variety
 Velocity
 Variability

(i) Volume – The name Big Data itself is related to a size which is
enormous. Size of data plays a very crucial role in determining value
out of data. Also, whether a particular data can actually be considered
as a Big Data or not, is dependent upon the volume of data.
Hence, 'Volume' is one characteristic which needs to be considered
while dealing with Big Data.

(ii) Variety – The next aspect of Big Data is its variety.

Variety refers to heterogeneous sources and the nature of data, both

structured and unstructured. During earlier days, spreadsheets and
databases were the only sources of data considered by most of the
applications. Nowadays, data in the form of emails, photos, videos,
monitoring devices, PDFs, audio, etc. are also being considered in the
analysis applications. This variety of unstructured data poses certain
issues for storage, mining and analyzing data.
(iii) Velocity – The term 'velocity' refers to the speed of generation of
data. How fast the data is generated and processed to meet the
demands, determines real potential in the data.

Big Data Velocity deals with the speed at which data flows in from
sources like business processes, application logs, networks, and social
media sites, sensors, Mobile devices, etc. The flow of data is massive
and continuous.

(iv) Variability – This refers to the inconsistency which can be shown

by the data at times, thus hampering the process of being able to
handle and manage the data effectively.

Benefits of Big Data Processing

Ability to process Big Data brings in multiple benefits, such as-

o Businesses can utilize outside intelligence while taking

decisions

Access to social data from search engines and sites like facebook,
twitter are enabling organizations to fine tune their business
strategies.

o Improved customer service

Traditional customer feedback systems are getting replaced by new

systems designed with Big Data technologies. In these new systems,
Big Data and natural language processing technologies are being used
to read and evaluate consumer responses.

o Early identification of risk to the product/services, if any

o Better operational efficiency

Big Data technologies can be used for creating a staging area or

landing zone for new data before identifying what data should be
moved to the data warehouse. In addition, such integration of Big
Data technologies and data warehouse helps an organization to
offload infrequently accessed data.
 Social business intelligence tools help encourage collaboration, reveal the data and
content valuable to users, and help create popular business users and content.
Popularity is not just chosen to measure quality, but also to measure business value.
It provides insight for IT and BI teams to standardize data and content in addition to
providing high quality, certified, and curated data to the users. Business users can
learn from one another, and can also share, rate, and discuss. They can also
optimize their time if they don’t have to reinvent a report. Collaborative decision-
making among business users is promoted through the use of Social Business
Intelligence software. It also facilitates BI tool user adoption, allowing the
organization to share knowledge and resources.

Collaborative Business Intelligence

Collaborative business intelligence is the process of business intelligence and
collaboration technologies coming together to support an ambiance of new and
improved decision-making methods. In collaborative business intelligence, the
workers and business managers interact with each other in order to improve the
communication system. They share the important findings related to business
intelligence and discuss their respective meanings and the possible options available
to improve the performance of the business. Discovery and documentation serve as
key features in collaborative BI.

With the help of collaborative methods such as utilizing a business dashboard,

workers are able to share information as to why certain events are unfolding in a
particular way and so on. Using related data, content, and the business context
behind findings, users can add their own knowledge to the results of business
intelligence. Through feedback mechanisms including comments, ratings, tags,
blogs, and microblogs, the results of published BI can be enhanced.

The main motive behind any BI program is to make timely and more efficient
business decisions, and a collaborative business intelligence environment supports
that by letting the members assess the situations and make decisions as a team.
Organizations can also analyze the validity of the decisions taken and the impact
they will have on the business. This kind of analysis leads to feedback that can aid in
improving the decision-making process, letting companies document the best
practices and monitor the data that’s the most useful in this scenario.

The three most important aspects of collaborative business intelligence are as

follows:

 Knowledge Discovery: When IT departments isolate a user’s experience to mere reports, it

can be quite stifling. However, with collaborative business intelligence, users can resort to
reusing the ideas and capabilities that are already available, hence eliminating the need to
reinvent the wheel. When such collaboration software is used, users can enhance the
information they possess by sharing it with the other users as well.
 Knowledge Retention: The intellectual property of organizations all around the world and
the items under them are not documented on a daily basis. However, collaborative BI helps
in changing that. Collaborative software helps in institutionalizing structured as well as
unstructured data to facilitate the sharing of insights, thoughts, information, and practices.
 Knowledge Proliferation: With the prevalence of the internet and social media in general,
all the good things are shared and passed around in a matter of minutes. Similarly, when
users come across software sites and solutions that are easy to use, they will pass the word
on to their friends, family, colleagues, and so on. Therefore, this will lead to the growth of
your data warehouse due to all the conversations that will take place, requiring information
from both inside and outside the organization.

Summing Up
Both social and collaborative business intelligence are new-age tools that help in
making business decisions. They make the process smoother by involving more
people from any given organization. Everyone pools in their thoughts and ideas,
evaluates the insights and findings and results, post which decisions are made on
how to move forward with any given situation. Therefore, they are both business
intelligence tools that companies should be employing in the current era in order to
make more efficient and competent business decisions.

# What is Social BI and How Can it Enable Business Success?

As Self-Serve Business Intelligence and Data Analytics has evolved,

the concept of Social BI and Business Intelligence collaboration has
become more prominent. Today’s trends in social networking and
collaboration drive Social BI within the organization and, as this
concept becomes more mainstream, business users and organizations
reap the benefits of these collaborative efforts and of shared Data
Analytics and data popularity.

What is Social BI?

Social BI encompasses the gathering, analysis, publishing, and

sharing of data, reports and information using interactive Business
Intelligence and Analytics dashboards and intuitive tools to improve
data clarity, and user understanding and comfort with analytical tools.
Social BI enables confident decisions and puts all users on the same
page so that activities, tasks and goals are driven by a shared
understanding and use of analytical tools and results. Perhaps the
most crucial aspect of Social BI lies in the power of its self-serve,
user-generated analysis and the application of business user
knowledge and skill to generate and share reports and data without the
assistance of data scientists or IT staff.
Social Business Intelligence encourages data sharing and analysis
across teams, divisions and business units to increase and improve
results in product development, projects, business processes, quality
control, etc.

How Can Social BI Enable Business Success?

Imagine an environment where business users can access a Business

Intelligence and analysis portal and see popular data to rate, share and
comment. This type of sharing can optimize resources by allowing
users to access reports, dashboards and data that might be just what
they need to complete a task or analysis. When you implement social
media and social networking within the Business Intelligence
environment business users can share, rate, discuss and learn from
others.

As Social BI cascades throughout the organization, the business

can nurture power users who take a creative, insightful approach to
data analysis. Just as social media users can ‘Like’ or ‘Share’ a
provocative post from another user, a social Business Intelligence tool
can support the same kind of collaboration, sharing and learning
within your organization. As power users emerge and data sharing
becomes more common, the average business user will develop a
better understanding of analytics and become more comfortable with
these techniques, and the organization will see improved user
adoption of BI tools.

A Social Business Intelligence tool creates ‘popular’ business users

and content, encourages collaboration, and reveals what data and
content is valued by users.

Popularity is not the measure of quality but rather a measure of

business value, providing insight for IT and BI teams to standardize
data and content and provide high quality, certified, curated data to
users.

Business users can share, rate, discuss and learn from other users and,
if they don’t have to reinvent a report, they can optimize their time.
Social Business Intelligence software promotes collaborative
decision-making among business users, drives BI tool user adoption,
and allows the organization to share resources and knowledge.

Geographic Business Intelligence, Geo-BI, another software sales

buzzword or something worth investigating further?
Technology companies love their acronyms, usually 3 letters, CRM,
ERP, GIS the list goes on. Now, hot on the heels of the “Big Data”
concept comes Geo BI; but what on earth is it?

Simply put, visualising company data using geographic mapping

applications can reveal much more than graphs, charts and tables can
on their own.
This is not a new concept I hear you all crying which it true, but..
Up until recently, functions like geographic mapping and business
intelligence resided in separate applications. If you wanted mapping
you needed to buy a geographic mapping package, if you wanted to
slice, dice data and share it round the organisation a BI tool was
required.
Historically mapping applications were stand-alone software
packages built up using expensive cartographic layers of information.
Google maps changed all that.
Geo Business Intelligence therefore is the convergence of geographic
mapping functionality with the best qualities of business information
systems.

Geo-BI resonates well as a concept

with modern organisations.
We’re collecting a phenomenal amount of data on a daily basis about
our customer interactions through a myriad of channels, 24 hours a
day, every day of the year.
Senior stakeholders are being asked to make decisions which require
the ability to turn all of this data into meaningful analysis.
Take the example above looking at the U.S, a simple question such as
“do I have enough sales territory coverage” is nigh on impossible to
answer via a BI tool alone. Add a map dimension and the answer

springs off the page.

This diagram shows customer groups by value, sure a chart would
show the same answer, but in this example we’re able to show how
valuable a customer is by the size of bubble and also where the
customers are physically located to points of interest such as a store or
where our reps are based. The BI part of the equation allows us to
drill up, drill down and add differing layers or dimensions of data
such as products, seasonality or even overlay a prospect list against
our customers.
Geo-BI is not a new concept, businesses that harness its power are
able to react in a more informed and agile way than those businesses
that are still viewing the world in 2-D.

# Customer Experience based BI.

When business intelligence (BI) first entered the hype cycle it was
considered the answer to all the ills that plagued the organisation.
It was proclaimed the seer that could sift through the depths of data
that was wasted within the company and that could unlock hidden
gems of insights that would transform business strategies and
customer engagements.
But it never quite delivered. For many, BI failed to hit the proverbial
target. Why? Because organisations didn’t realise that a successful BI
strategy is more than a technology investment, it’s a culture shift.
Most companies focused on getting the data together in an accessible
space, using BI to create dashboards and reports that did little more
than clog inboxes and create beautiful visuals.
Only a small percentage harnessed the potential of BI and used the
data to change the business. And only that small percentage
experienced the benefits that the technology had to offer.

8 Reasons to Use Business Intelligence to Improve

Customer Experience
1. Visualization
Humans are inherently visual creatures and being able to “see” something just helps
it click for us in a way that our other senses just can’t compete with. Businesses
generate truly staggering amounts of customer data, and much of this can be used
to inform decisions about customer experience. Here are just some of the customer
experience data types that forward-thinking companies collect:

 CSAT – Customer satisfaction scores. This is when you get your

customers to rate you on a simple scale of 1-5, or maybe even 1-10.
 Customer surveys – Creating effective surveys is a great way to
understand what your customers think and feel about your business.
Do you make their life easier? Is your app too hard to use? Do you
offer a painless customer journey?
  Social listening – Are you monitoring each time your company is
mentioned on social media? If you’re not, then you should be. Social
listening tools are a great way to protect your reputation and calm
angry customers before their public complaints gain too much
traction.

Sometimes we need to see this data in a visual format to truly understand it. Just
have numbers on a page often isn’t enough. With BI software, you can use
dashboards and create intelligent reports that bring the most critical data to the front.
Just a quick glance at the dashboard can remind you of what you need to focus on
and how to get there.

2. Creating a Data-Driven Culture

By focusing on business intelligence in your customer experience function, you can
create a broader appreciation of BI across the business. Business Intelligence has
been shown to boost company success, and if you are using it to boost success in
customer experience, you’ll have key data you can show senior employees on how
successful the project has been.

Companies that have a more data-driven mindset overall are more successful.
Again, this is about removing the guesswork. It’s about putting you on a path lead by
evidence and one you can be confident is going to give you results. Every team
benefit from this.

3. Smash Sales and Marketing Goals

One of the key benefits of improving customer experience is that you see increased
sales. When customers are happier, they spend more money on each purchase and
also buy from your company more frequently. If that’s not enough, then consider that
they also tell their friends and family about their experience and drive more
customers to your business. The foundation of great customer experience is
fostering loyalty. Your loyal customers spend a lot of money on your products, and
they become your brand promoters.

Every company has their own sales and marketing goals, and often these goals can
feel overwhelming to staff. It’s one thing to say, “you need to get X amount of sales
this quarter.” But putting that into action is a different thing entirely. With BI software,
you can see exactly what parts of your marketing are successful and which are not.
You can focus more time, attention, and resources into marketing campaigns that
are proven to be effective and boost your sales without doing much extra work. It’s a
no brainer.

4. Get a Deeper Understanding of Your Customers

When you start working with BI solutions and become deliberate about collecting
customer data, you start to understand your customers. Many companies think they
understand their customers, but in reality, they don’t. It’s only by spotting patterns
that you find things you would never have figured out by yourself.

It’s essential that you work hard to understand your customers on a deeper level
because we can guarantee that your competitors are. When you understand what
your customers like, feel, and want, you can start to deliver the services that exceed
their expectations. However, you could be in trouble if your competitors get there
first.

The world today is different from a decade ago or two decades ago. It’s fiercely
competitive for businesses out there, but just trying to sell harder is no longer an
option. Consumers today are more resistant to being sold to. They hate a hard sell;
they hate being pitched to. They just want to see the value in your products through
the experiences of people like them. This is why reviews and word of mouth
marketing are still such an essential part of business in 2020. Without having the
option of calling your customers up repeatedly to try and sell to them, you need to
find other ways to bring them to your company.

5. Easier and Faster Reporting

You’re never done creating the perfect customer experience strategy. Customers are
constantly evolving and their expectations constantly changing. You can create a
customer experience strategy today, but in 5 years it may no longer apply to most
consumers. Of course, this isn’t to say that you shouldn’t make customer experience
strategies, but that you should continually assess your data to ensure you’re doing
best by your customers.

To do this, you need to have quick and easy access to current data and customer
trends. With BI tools, you can generate reports quickly and see instantly whether
your customer experience strategy is working, or whether it needs some
improvement.

6. Break Down Silos

Silos remain a huge problem in businesses all over the world. Teams become insular
and solely focused on their team and their output, often failing to engage with other
teams unless necessary. Sometimes there is rivalry or tribalism within teams in the
business, and this worsens the problem.

However, with BI tools, you can break down silos and get more teams collaborating
on how to improve customer experience or the business as a whole. BI can be used
in several functions across the business, including:

 Sales – For visualizing the customer journey from the first contact to
after-sales support. You can also create insightful forecasts and
reports.
 Monitoring customer service in real-time or over time.
 Finance – QUick visual overviews of company performance for
business decision-makers.
 Marketing – Generating critical insights into the success of
campaigns and understanding the ROI.
 Production – Identify areas of friction and ways to improve.
 IT – Gathering important data about the health of the IT environment
on a dashboard. This can help identify risks ahead of time.
7. Call Center Efficiency
BI tools can help improve efficiency in call centers which will then improve customer
experiences. Many customers complain that they have to wait a long time to talk to a
customer service agent, or that when they do, the agent was less than helpful. BI
tools are used in call centers to display dashboards and report on efficiency in real-
time. This can help managers know when staff need more help or attention. It can
also help agents stay on track if they can see the goals, they are being measured
against right in front of them.

8. Improving Employee Performance

With BI dashboards, employees can see exactly how they are performing by clicking
a few buttons. This simply wasn’t possible in the past, and many employees were
kept in the dark about their day-to-day performance. Performance matters for all
staff, but particularly for customer facing staff because these are the ones who are
mostly likely to impact customer experiences.

This is changing
Today, organisations have made the implementation of BI solutions
into a holistic journey that focuses on consolidating the data,
discovering the insights, and then really leveraging these insights to
make fundamental change.
These three steps – consolidate, discover and visualise – underpin a
truly successful BI strategy and are fast becoming best practice in an
industry in need of fresh ways to engage with customers and markets.
The quality of data and the capabilities of BI have also improved. The
technology is targeted, the data more relevant, the insights cleaner and
more focused. This has changed how companies approach their BI
investment. And it is transforming how organisations engage with
customers across multiple platforms and departments, particularly the
contact centre.
Imagine, for a moment, being a customer. You contact a company
about an issue. It’s not the first time you’ve had this problem and
you’re dreading the long explanation, the ‘please hold’, and the
relentless cycle of having to wait, explain and repeat.
Personalising the customer experience is not an easy ask.
Now imagine if the company knows who you are from the outset and
the call centre agent immediately understands the context and has
visibility into all your other interactions with the company.
Imagine if the entire problem is already being worked on and you’re
provided with an immediate status report. Imagine if the business
contacted you proactively – letting you know about a product, a
service or a problem resolution without any need for you to chase and
chase?
These scenarios are not implausible. These are the reality of the
modernised contact centre that leverages the capabilities of BI to
create seamless customer journeys.
Personalising the customer experience is not an easy ask. It needs the
BI to facilitate it, but it also needs for the organisation to have
embedded a culture that’s capable of really using what BI can offer to
engage with customers.
Use the BI to reshape how the call centre operates – reduce the
amount of time customers spend waiting or listening to options that
have nothing to do with them by customising each engagement.
Use BI to solve customer problems – proactively uncover issues and
provide the kind of service that transforms users into loyal customers.
Use BI to venture into new markets – access customers that will
benefit from what you have to offer thanks to intelligent insights and
data visualisation.
If a business understands each and every customer, recognises their
preferences, and talks to them in their language, then it is really
getting the most out of BI to fundamentally transform its future.