The power and effectiveness of a Business Intelligence (BI) initiative relies heavily on the data driving the analytics and reports. This data needs to be cleaner, deeper, and faster so an organization’s BI tools can do their magic in putting valuable information at the fingertips of their employees throughout the company structure.
Cleaner– It used to be that data used within a single department within the organization worked just fine as long it was useful to that department. Small irregularities and informal collection strategies could be overlooked as long as that sliver of the organization was operating smoothly. Today, with BI, consumers of that data may work in completely different areas of the company. Data no longer stays within a silo of the organization, but is combined with data throughout. Bringing together information from these disparate sources requires the data be cleaned up and normalized so it can be combined smoothly and efficiently without knowing the inner workings of each individual department.
Deeper– How could that small piece of information possibly matter much to an employee outside the department? We don’t even include it in our own reports. Such shortsighted views on the value of data must change for a BI initiative to reach its potential. Employees generating information have no idea how valuable the information could be when placed in a different context and integrated with data from other parts of the organization. All data must be made available to allow for the discovery of hidden insights that, pre-BI, would have gone unnoticed.
Faster– It seems like an exaggeration, but often it’s not, that reports that used to take months to compile can now be generated by BI tools in a matter of hours or even minutes. To maximize this kind of rapid reporting, information must be part of an efficient data system. This is also not the time to save a few dollars on hiring anyone but the best technical people, be it internal employees or external consultants, to build an infrastructure that not only creates cleaner data but also operates in near real-time.
Those in charge of a company’s BI initiative know the complexities and challenges of making data cleaner, deeper and faster. But a good implementation should hide all the complexity and seem simple and straightforward to the company’s BI consumers. The right data feeds the organization’s BI tools to make analysis a self-service operation that provides powerful predictive analysis and other reports.
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