DATA FOR

BUSINESS
INTELLIGENCE
(Data & Reports)

BEE Digital Growth AG Zurich / Berlin / info@bee.digital

+41 43 336 90 00 Munich www.bee.digital
INTERACTIVE INDEX

Why your reports might not reflect the reality of your business................3
Part 1..................................................................................................................................3
Do my reportscontain multiple data sources?.............................................. 3
Howare data attributes
set up?.......................................................................................................................... 4
Recommendations for the exercise.................................................................. 5
Part 2..................................................................................................................................6
Howis my data collected?..................................................................................... 6
Howare my metrics calculated?......................................................................... 6
Is my report chart the correct one to showcase the learnings?............. 8

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Why your reports Part 1
might not reflect the Is my data up to date?
reality of your business It might sound silly, but if your data uses figures
Have you ever been in a meeting where all the
reports show you outstanding numbers and
only green lights? You wonder how that could
be possible when your experience on the front-
line of the business reflects a different reality.
There are two potential answers:
1. People are lying about the reports and
corrupting data voluntarily.
2. The data is wrong and does not reflect the
reality.
It is my hope that you work with honest people
who apply best practices when processing and
presenting data. In most cases, however, it’s the
latter issue that is most likely to be causing the
discord, and that’s the one I’m going to address.
In this blog, I’d like to present you with a few
tips on how to set up a proper database for your
organisation – in particular, if you use multiple
sourcesfor your reporting.
Do a quick troubleshoot
Start small; there‘s no need to change the world
in a single day. Compare the data shown in the
report with your experience, it’s likely that your
colleagues had the same reservations about the
results, and you’re all probably right!
to the top
from a different desired data range, the report
won’t be
realistic. Ensure that your database adminis-
trator gave you the latest information or the
relevant data set
you need for your report. It‘s also your respon-
sibility to ask for the exact data set you need.
Check in with the administrator to verify how
frequently the data is refreshed.
Imagine that you have two systems, A and B.
System A sends raw data to System B only once
a week. You rely on your System B for that set
of data and do your reporting on Wednesday.
However, the interface (the connector between
System A and System B) operates only on
Thursday. This means you will always be one
week late with your reporting.
Do my reportscontain
multiple data sources?
If your data is all coming from a single source,
you might skip this part. However, if you collect
data from multiple sources you need to ensure
that your data is consistent and accurate.
In my experience, multiple sources of data
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often corrupt your report organically if you
try to measure KPIs which are actually shared
between systems. What does that mean?
Here is an example
You are collecting data from Facebook Busi-
ness Manager (the Facebook Advertising Tool)
to measure cost performance and you also
use Google Analytics to compare conversion
performance; you might have discrepancies.
Why? Facebook and Google have different
attribution models. Facebook and Google
don’t align in their methodology of calculating
conversions. As a result, you will have discre-
pancies in your report if you simply combine
data from two different sources sharing
common metrics.
Howare data attributes
set up?
How did you or your system administrator set
up the attributesin your database? Do they fit
your business requirements? What I mean by
that is easier to explain with a real-life situation.
Let‘s pick the example of a CRM system where
you collect information about your clients such
as occupation, age, and type of subscriptions
they have with your company (imagine a SaaS
environment) or products that yourcompany
sells.
Let‘s do a small exercise here and try to
picture how these three customers’ attributes
need to be configured in your organisation.
[My recommendations can be found at the
bottom of the firstsection Part 1]
Mandatory fields
Which fields are required? If data is collected
from multiple sources for the same field, do you
ensure the consistency of your data? If a report
contains empty fields, you might revise if this is
actually what you expected. This might also be
the expected behaviour as empty values also
have a significance.
Type fields
There are numerous types of fields which I will
not explain in an exhaustive manner but only
mention the most frequent ones:
• text
• numeric value
• checkbox
• dropdown
• boolean (true or false/0 or1)
• date
• formula
The way you structure your data will massively
influence how it is connected between these
fields and the ultimate outcomes of your report.
Think about your business needs to structure
the data. I‘ve seen companies collecting a custo-
mer‘s occupation attribute with a text field. This
can result in you having 10‘000 different values
in your database with plenty of errors. Other
companies collect data for this field with a drop-
down menu (pre-selected values that you can
choose from – only one choice is applicable),
ending upwith the majority of theirclients being
„occupation = other“.
Updating methods
This is a rather technical part which you may
not be familiar with, but it‘s important to
understand the mechanisms. How data are
created might depend on the methods of your
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interface (or the connector between System A
and System B). I will simply mention here two
basic functionalities:
• Create/Insert: This is the most basic method
when creating a new data record – the value
will simply be parsed into your attribute field.
• Update/Overwrite: This is a very important
feature where you should decide if your field
should be updated or not. Do you want the
customer to update his address? Yes, proba-
bly. Do youwant your customer to update his
password? Yes. Do you want your customer
to update his date of birth? Maybe not! This
information should not vary unless your
customer made a mistake upon registration.
Think about your services where a special
package is only marketed to people below
18 (e.g. 50% off on annual phone plan). If
you give the customer the ability to change
his or her date of birth, you may encounter
someone who has eternally remained in their
teens.
birth. So you might want to create a date field
to collect the customer birthdate and ask your
system administrator / data scientist to create
a formula field / calculated field to return the
correct value into age (basically today‘s date -
date of birth).
Subscriptions/Products:
Most probably you already know your
products/services so you don‘t want to leave
this field open for the client but rather create a
dropdown. The concern here is to understand
the way your products/services are connected
to your client. Can they subscribe to multip-
le services at the same time? If your client
can have only one option, you might set up a
dropdown field for this attribute; however, if
a customer can have multiple services at the
same time, you should opt for a multi-select
dropdown field.

Recommendations for
the exercise
Occupation:

How is this information relevant for your orga-

nisation? Keep in mind that some people might
have two occupations! People also change jobs
–– how do you keep that information up to
date? Do you have any client portals so they can
amend this information or do you collect only
when they first register? Is this field also requi-
red in your organisation?

Age:

Do you want to collect the age of your custo-

mers or rather their birth date? Asthe famous
motto states“age is just a number“, but it‘s also
a dynamic value which evolves from the date of

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Part 2
Howis my data collected?
You have one report but how many data
sources do you use to compile it and how do
you collect them? There are various sources
of data; you can upload your data manually or
automatically.
1. Manualcollection of data
Not many businesses collect their data
manually anymore, and I’d highly recom-
mendthat you avoid this method. For
example, by using a physical questionnai-
re to collect data at an event, you still risk
making mistakes. Youwant to collect e-mail
addresses? From experience, I know that
some users can‘t write their e-mail address
correctly on a paper. Are you registering the
data for the user? You may write some things
down incorrectly. In summary, digital forms
are far less prone to errors.
2. Automation collection of datawith manual
export
You might use digital forms already or your
data is automatically collected by a system
which you only need to export. Most of
the time, people export data in .csv file to
refine/clean it. If you have multiple sources
on your report, it’s important to pay close
attention to the details because the metrics
from System A may not entirely match the
metrics from System B. You will end up with
discrepancies, that‘s why it‘s crucial to have
matching metrics when comparing data
from two systems.
3. Automation collection of data with
synchronisation to another system
I would highly recommend to use this
method as it‘s the most reliable, but also
the most time consuming and requires a
lot of effort. In order to automate the flow
of data running into another system (ideally
centralised), you need some specialists such
as a business analyst, a system administ-
rator, a developer and possibly a solution
architect. Essentially, this is what every good
businessshould be doing with their data sets
nowadays.
Once the implementation is done and your
team has developed the interface correctly,
the data from both systems should match
entirely. This is achieved by ensuring that the
systems successfully communicate with one
another and the data synchronises to accura-
tely reflect your business.
Howare my metrics
calculated?
Metrics are the units that will determine how
your data will be displayed. How do you usually
measure your data? What is the timeframe?
What is the currency?
If you are active in a local market, it might be
asier to manage your data metrics than in an
international context. However, in order to have
the big picture, we‘ll review an international-
company so you can have a good overview of
the actual challenge I‘m trying to demonstrate
with data metrics.
Let‘s assume you‘re in charge of creating
reports for three markets: CH-UK -JP. You will
need to adjust the currency level (most of the
time international companies tend to have an
internal fix-rate, so there‘s no market fluctua-
tion during a fiscal year). Another example,
which might be a bit more tricky, is to compare
conversion rates. I’ll need to illustrate this with
some mathematics:
The CH market does an internal weekly conver-
sion rate report, the UK doesit bi-weekly, and
the JP does it monthly. How are you going to
calculate to compare the data? Are you simply
going to add them up and divide by the combi-
ned timeframe ? This method would be wrong,
and the result would look like this:
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You want to „flatten“ your data first and dig
deeper into the metrics used to calculate
conversions, meaning that you should also
consider the units and data driving that
conversion rate. Let‘s assume it was lead/
unique page view.

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As you can observe CH market has actually a
better conversion rate once the data has been
flattened. The conclusion is that you should
always“flatten“ your data with common
metrics (convert them into one common
metric).

Is my report chart the

correct one to showcase
the learnings?
Let‘s focus now on data visualization and how
are you going to demonstrate your learnings in
the best possible way.

Tables

Tables are probably the most intuitive way to

display data as you can really add any type of
data with different dimensions. This is a good
way to have an overview of your business’
performance. My recommendation would be
to keep tables clean and display only the most
important information. It‘s not much use if you
have a report with a table with 2000 lines or
2000 columns.

Histogram/Bars

This is a great way to show different „products“

on one single chart with a timeline. Bars are

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the bestway to showcase if you have a total
to calculate for multiple dimensions grouped
in a single chart. Let‘s illustrate this with the
evolution of annual sales for three different
productsfrom your portfolio and you want to
see how they perform.
Pie Chart
A pie chart will only display a full 100% set of
data. This is a great way to have a comparison
in a bagel/cheese representation (depending
on your culture and preference) about one
unique dimension!
We use it to keep track of relative values and
compare them to each other. If you have a
dimension with 25 value sources, the pie chart
might not be the most suitable one as you‘ll
lose track of the smallest values. I wouldn‘t
recommend it if you have above eight diffe-
rent values––unless you want to group them
together if some can be combined. I would also
avoid it if I know that 90% of my pie chart will
be absorbed by one value (it‘slike Obélix eating
a pie, for thosewho know“Astérix&Obélix“).
Line Chart
It is similar to histogram and bar charts but
gives a better representation of one period to
another in terms of evolution (increase/decrea-
se). You can have line charts with one dimen-
sion or multiple dimensions as well. You must
remember to be careful when you combine all
these dimensions, however,so that they are the
same along both the X and Y axis.
Others: Treemap/GeoMap/Gauge/Funnel
• There are other types of charts which are
less common, such as treemaps which are
similar to pie charts. Unlike pie charts,
however, you might have a bit more informa-
tion on the chart for dominant values.
• Geo Maps are a wonderful way to showcase
a dimension with a geographical area. It‘s
most often representedwith dots which are
then represented on the map by size.
• If you want to set a goal for your KPI, you
would then use a gauge to keep track of
your performance. Your goal would be set to
100% (full bar), and the current % will simply
set your actual performance.
• A funnel chart might be a bit more difficult
to set up asit might involve data from multip-
le sources, but it‘s a wonderful way to see
the flow from one step to another with the
percentage of conversion. It gives a lot of
insights about how well your customers are
converting in the workflow as you might be
able to identify the bottleneck in the custo-
mer journey.
Thanks for reading! This second part was a bit
more technical than the first article, but I hope
it gave you a better understanding on how to
handle data and avoid mistakes on your report.
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BEE Digital Growth AG Zurich / Berlin / info@bee.digital

+41 43 336 90 00 Munich www.bee.digital