A business intelligence strategy is your game plan for using data to make smarter decisions and improve operations across your company.
It’s not just about picking the right technology or software platform—there’s much more involved in genuinely seeing a return on your investment.
Let’s break down the steps to build a business intelligence strategy that works for your organization.
What is a Business Intelligence Strategy?
A solid strategy focuses on how you’ll implement the software, manage data for analysis, and empower your team to make informed decisions with that data.
When done right, a business intelligence strategy can give your company actionable insights, like tracking sales performance, predicting salary trends, or even making sure your shipping department knows exactly what needs to go out daily.
Steps to Building an Effective Business Intelligence Strategy
Building a solid business intelligence strategy goes beyond just choosing software. It’s about aligning data with your business goals and empowering your team to make informed decisions.
Here’s a quick guide to help you create a strategy that drives results.
Align With Business Goals
Before diving into any tech, ensure your BI strategy aligns with your business goals. Business intelligence can transform how your company operates by giving employees access to trusted, relevant data they can use to make decisions daily.
This initiative is about putting the correct data in the right hands helping your team make informed calls that advance the business.
Step 1: Choose a Sponsor
To get things started, you need an executive sponsor, someone with the authority to champion the project and bring others on board.
A Chief Data Officer (CDO) or another top-level executive is ideal. They will need to consider scaling the BI platform across the company and ensure the proper support and training are in place.
Keep your sponsor in the loop with regular updates, and once your BI platform is up and running, deliver high-impact reports to prove the strategy’s success.
Step 2: Choose Your BI Platform
Your business intelligence platform is essential but outside the strategy. Once you’ve got a sponsor, it’s time to select a BI tool that suits your business needs.
Features to consider include how the platform handles data access, interactivity with data, and how easily users can dive deeper into the data for new insights.
The platform should also support team collaboration, allowing everyone to share and analyze data seamlessly.
Step 3: Identify Key Stakeholders
BI isn’t just an IT project, nor is it just for finance. Every team impacted by the BI plan should have a seat at the table. Bring in representatives from each department early in the process.
Interview them to understand how they currently use data, what’s working, and what needs improvement. These insights will help shape the scope of your BI initiative.
Step 4: Build Your BI Team
Your BI team will be the backbone of your strategy’s implementation. Depending on the size of your organization, this could be a dedicated team of people wearing multiple hats.
The BI team will need an IT service owner, an enterprise architect, a site administrator, and a data steward. This cross-functional team will get the platform up and running and ensure it works for non-technical users.
Step 5: Define the Scope of BI
Before launching any BI tools, decide what business intelligence means for your company. Will you use it to make decisions about finance, HR, supply chain, or something else? The scope needs to be crystal clear.
For instance, Coca-Cola uses BI for customer service dashboards, Chipotle for performance comparisons between locations, and HelloFresh for automating campaign reporting.
Knowing your focus will help you measure the right metrics, such as KPIs, that reflect your company’s goals.
Step 6: Prepare Your Data Infrastructure
Accurate business intelligence depends on having clean, reliable data sources. Traditionally, BI tools pull from a data warehouse, but modern BI can work with multiple data sources.
You’ll need to understand which data sources (both trusted, like financial records, and untrusted, like emails or social media) are crucial for your analysis. Survey stakeholders to determine which data sources they rely on so you can plan accordingly.
Step 7: Create a Business Intelligence Roadmap
Now that you’ve established the basics developing a roadmap is time. This plan will outline the steps for implementing your BI strategy, including critical milestones like when your data warehouse will be ready and when the BI platform will launch.
Stay proactive, adapting the roadmap as needed. Remember that business intelligence works best when it’s forward-looking, not reactive. Plan for new market trends or customer behavior shifts and adjust your strategy to stay ahead.
BI Strategy Implementation
Implementing your BI software is a significant project, but it’s only one piece of the overall strategy.
Your IT department will play a significant role here, but communication with the BI team is vital. Use project management frameworks, such as agile or traditional, and ensure there’s a feedback loop in place.
Before going live, decide who the BI team reports to and how they’ll share updates. Also, work with IT to determine security permissions, ensuring stakeholders have the right level of access to the data without compromising security.
Breaking the implementation into phases with feedback at each step will help keep the project on track and allow adjustments as needed.
Succeed with a Business Intelligence Strategy
A solid business intelligence strategy helps your company make smarter decisions and stay ahead of the competition. These steps will set the foundation for turning data into actual business results.At Corpim, we make it easy for businesses to use intelligence to boost performance and lead in their industries. Level up your business with us!
