Do You Have What it Takes for a Business Intelligence System that Really Works?
Once you get your business intelligence software up and running is it over? Definitely not. Maintaining a successful business intelligence system is a matter of creating an ongoing relationship across your divisions, and maintaining an attitude of cooperation and collaboration. What you’ll see on the other side of that effort are greater returns and benefits from your business intelligence system, and these rewards will keep the collaboration alive and well.
See You Later, Silo Data
What does it take to get a successful business intelligence system going? To start, it takes a commitment across your leadership and your team that you’ll say goodbye to fragmented, pieced-out systems for collecting and analyzing data – even if these are the reporting, querying and forecasting tools you’ve used for several years. You’ll also have to make a commitment to business intelligence everyone can access in order to help make the best team-based decisions. (Can you hear the phrase “the end of silos?”) This change to your infrastructure starts, like many processes, with a plan.
Business Intelligence Systems are More than Their Price Tags
As you prepare your plan for deploying a business intelligence system, realize that you’ll have to consider your strategy from your IT perspective – and also from the business side. This can naturally turn your head toward the price of implementation. In the mainframe environment, you’ll find that many are supporting more advanced software offerings than ever before and are becoming more cost-efficient. You’ll also find that in the distributed environment, many systems are operating like a mainframe, including functions like data partitioning and data workload management. The decision you make on a platform must also reflect changing needs for server size, if you’ll add or take away staff, and if there will be losses to production while you transfer data or learn to use your business intelligence system’s tools.
Collaboration Equals Culture Shifts
While cost is certainly important, the big picture of business intelligence systems is how they fundamentally change the way your data is used to make strategic, effective decisions. Conveying this sense of worth to your management peers, your staff and your stakeholders means you get closer to an attitude of collaboration and cooperation that is the right setting for moving forward with your business intelligence solution.
Within the new attitude of collaboration, your IT team, for example, may have to make some core shifts. Many organizations are seeking real-time tools from their business intelligence system, even transferring key customer data to the screens of customer service agents. In order to create this kind of quality, intuitive customer response, your IT team may need to make significant process changes.
Details, Details – Integral In Your Business Intelligence System
Ideally, the tools your business intelligence system delivers will be manipulated and maximized at the closest place possible to where the data originates. You’re talking details – rather than mass data dumping into a warehouse. You may need an intermediate data store tool to deliver information in real-time while simultaneously allowing warehouse capture. This can heighten the task for your management and IT team, as well as bring on significant operational shifting.
Don’t Rush Into Your Business Intelligence Plan
What can you do? Take enough time to map out what your expectations are for your business intelligence system, and how far you’re willing to go to set up an atmosphere where those expectations are realized. Allow your IT team to fully know the ins-and-outs of the changes to data processing that may come their way, but how these changes will make a serious and positive impact on your future. Start with a well-developed and well-thought business plan, focusing on the value the business intelligence system can provide, rather than getting deterred by focusing only on skills needs and infrastructure changes.