Having no business intelligence solution in place impacts many things and many people. It impacts your bottom line, it impacts your customers, it impacts your employees, and it impacts the understanding of your business right now and in the future.
Your bottom line
With having no business intelligence solution in place, a business cannot see the full picture on what is happening. The business cannot see where all its money is being spent, it cannot see what areas are most inefficient, they cannot see what area they are most efficient in and why and then drive those efficiencies to other areas of their business. They slow down and prevent the business from making real-time data driven decisions. Without seeing the big picture, the business can be limited or just wrong on actions that are taken that they believe are good for the business. All of these reasons as well as many more impacts your business’s bottom line.
Your customers
Having no business intelligence solution does impact your customer. I get a lot of feedback on this one and it is usually from the people that do have the silos of data running within their business. They want to feel better by giving me excuses on how not having a business intelligence solution does not impact their customers. I always tell people that if you cannot get a full picture, a full understanding of the journey a customer takes from the start of the relationship to the end of their relationship within your business you sir or mam will never see its full potential. With so many touch points that a customer could have with a business you have the potential of creating many silos of data. These silos can be in reference to marketing, selling customers additional services, interaction with customer support and even the customer on-boarding process. All these systems and any others should be integrated in order for you to get a clear understanding of the experiences your customers will go through. The silos of data, the lack of the single source of truth will hamper that understanding and the business will never understand the customer’s journey. Picture this: a stack chart and on the X axis you have date values representing the last two weeks, and on the Y axis you have a numeric representation of hours. Within the charting you have multiple columns (different colors) representing different touch points that a new customer had to take in order to become a customer and then received their service from your business. Within seconds you can see where you can improve the process and where the process is working. That is just one powerful reason on how business intelligence can impact your customers and having a single source of truth can help your business.
Your employees
How does no business intelligence solution impact your employees? Without a business intelligence solution, you have silo’s that can affect employees when other departments within your business do not wish to share their data. Think about how many times have you heard or have been involved when a department within a business has identified a problem but cannot do anything about it. I have seen a business identify a problem and could not take the appropriate measures to correct that problem because of silos of data. This can be corrected by doing several things. First, leadership must create a unified front and be creative and tactical in their approach. Work towards a common goal. I know each department has its own responsibilities but the business should have one shared vision — the business’s mission statement. Create the data governance group because that will encourage collaboration, build repeatable processes, share measures across the business, and the group will act as one team pushing to that common goal. Most humans instinctively will get behind a common goal and will feel more united when they can share the same measure of excellence to be obtained with the person next to them.
Embedded and Conversational Business Intelligence This is not just ordinary reporting BI software, but advanced integrated reporting and analytics.