Data, if used intelligently, provides visibility into every aspect of your business and can be used to solve all problems. Today, most organizations use technology to get insights from their data and then use those insights to drive every business decision that needs to be taken. This helps them to solve complex problems with ease and come up with ideas and strategies to stay ahead of their competition.
Whether your organization is a start-up or an industry leader, you need to make smart decisions to remain competitive in the market. An enterprise BI platform helps you make data-driven decisions by providing a single comprehensive view of data across your enterprise. In this article, we will examine how you can build an Enterprise BI platform and use it solve your business problems.
Set up your data platform
The first step in building a business intelligence platform is to identify what data needs to be stored and where it can be stored. You also need to get clear on the analytical needs of your organization by asking questions such as what data is available and how can it be used, if historical data form a significant component of analytics or is real-time monitoring and analysis more important, who within your organization will be using this data for insights, how quickly do they need the insights, and so on.
If you already have your data silos in place, you can consolidate them to create a single source of truth across your organization. In today’s environment where huge amount of data gets generated and collected each day, it makes sense to move to a Big Data platform. Depending upon your needs and existing infrastructure, you can design your on-premise or cloud business intelligence platform to become the brain behind your business decisions There are many tools and technologies available today for data-related needs but choosing the right platform and technology is vital for achieving current goals and preparing for the future. Data integrity, security, and governance are other concerns that need to be addressed at this stage.
Empower your users with BI
Once you have set up your data platform, you need to make sure that it is easily accessible to your business users so that they can pull insights whenever they require them. For this, data should be available to users across the organization, as soon as they need it, and in a format in which they can understand it.
Instead of limiting data access to a select few, it should be accessible to everyone, so that every function in the organization is empowered to use the available data for their day-to-day work. Users should be able to ask their questions and the answers should help them take better decisions.
This can be done by building an enterprise BI consumption layer on top of your data platform that allows business users to consume data without the need of technical expertise or IT support. Enabling self-service access to data will make it easy for them to use data for business benefits.
Enjoy the results
When data insights become a part of an organization’s culture and are easily available to everyone across the organization, they can help in improving processes and solving problems. Insights at the operational level have helped companies detect bottlenecks, identify problems, and take corrective actions. Insights at the strategic level help in better planning and improving strategic decision-making.
By building a robust enterprise BI platform, you can turn volumes of data into meaningful insights that lead to faster, more accurate decisions and ignite the power of your organization.