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Tips to give your BI strategy a health kick

No one could have predicted the upheaval that Coronavirus would bring to almost every facet of our daily lives.

Businesses were forced to adapt to lockdown almost overnight and deal with ever-changing social-distancing regulations in order to maintain continuity. While many organisations enthusiastically adopted remote working tools, other digital projects were put on the backburner as survival became the priority.

Thankfully, it looks as though some semblance of normality will soon be restored, so there’s no better time to get your digital strategy back on track. Maximising the value of your data can help your organisation become more efficient, more agile, more customer-focused, and, ultimately, more successful. Business Intelligence (BI) tools are key to achieving this.

We’ve put together five tips to give your BI strategy a health kick:

1. Improve your (data) diet

Data is one of your most important assets. The more useful information your business has, the better the decisions it can make. But just as a junk food binge will offset the benefits of healthy eating, junk data can make it difficult to pull out meaningful insights.

BI tools can improve the health of your data by identifying relevant information and allowing you to create reports that you can use to make strategic business decisions

2. Get leaner and save money

Just as January is a popular time to shift any pounds you’ve piled on during lockdown (or over the festive season), it’s also a great time to leverage unused data resources, streamline systems, and adopt more lightweight cloud infrastructure.

Getting into shape needn’t cost the Earth. The data you already have is a free resource that can be used to spot trends and areas for improvement, and the cloud is far more cost-effective and flexible than the legacy infrastructure that may have served you well in the past.

The next time you’re thinking about updating your hardware, consider using your budget to move to the cloud instead. Cloud and hybrid solutions enable you to reduce upfront costs, scale up and down when you need to, and make better use of your data – especially if you also adopt BI.

3. Fuel your business

Much like a festive hangover, many businesses are still feeling the effects of a challenging year. If you’re feeling low on resources, it makes sense to do everything you can to improve efficiency. One way to do this is by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks and freeing up staff up to work on higher value tasks. For example, Transport for London (TfL) now uses a self-reporting tool to allow 65,000 licensed taxi drivers to upload their own data directly to a database, saving staff from processing over 2000 emails a week.

4. Create a fitter, healthier business

When you introduce a new routine into your personal life, it makes sense to start small. You wouldn’t try to run a marathon on your first attempt at jogging, and the same applies to Business Intelligence. When adopting new technology, you should identify the best processes and mix of services before making a final decision. For example, should you adopt Power BI or Tableau in your organisation?  

One advantage of Power BI is that you can get started with a single user licence for as little as £10 per month, and by using pre-built ‘plug and play’ dashboards for the likes of Salesforce and Google, you can see results quickly. Once you’ve got the basics sorted, you can expand the rollout and improve the health of your organisation.

5. Keep on track

It’s important to take a long-term view when doing anything new. Changes that you made to ensure the survival of your business during 2020-21 may not be appropriate for the long term.

Is your business ready to cope with a changing regulatory environment, the implications of Brexit, and ongoing fluid market conditions?

There’s no one recipe for success – but the more you know about your organisation, your customers and your market, the better your chances of prosperity. BI tools can help keep you informed and provide actionable insights that can give you the edge over the competition.

A change++ BI Health Check provides a snapshot of your data and BI environment and can help you set goals for improvement that will deliver long term benefits.

 

Get started with a BI Health Check.

 

 

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