Setting a Business Intelligence Strategy

Below is the continuation of the transcript of a Webinar hosted by InetSoft on the topic of Business Analytics and Competitive Advantage. The presenter is Mark Flaherty, Chief Marketing Officer at InetSoft.

Mark Flaherty (MF): So here is where we are today in terms of setting a business intelligence strategy. We know we have to take some steps to get there. This is our future state which will obviously require this next step in what is our roadmap to get to the future state, both from an organizational perspective, as well as from a BI solutions and tools perspective.

And just continuing down this thread, a BI strategy helps us define what metrics we need to track to be successful, what is most important to our executives, and how should we align organizationally to fulfill that BI vision. Finally, ultimately, what is our data warehouse or set of operational data stores? What is our architecture, and what tools are needed to meet these needs according to our vision?

If we take a look at the importance or the benefit of business intelligence to both IT and the business, there is a connection there. For the IT side, one, they actually get tied into the business to understand what their needs are so they can more easily align their strategies to support the business because the business is typically their number one customer.

Align CIO and Business Exec Strategy

And as we talked about earlier how the CIO strategy and the business exec strategy are not aligned. Getting them together to discuss a BI strategy will help align those priorities. And also based on not only the needs of a single department, business department, IT can start rationalizing the needs across departments, across business units and across the enterprise to determine what their BI and roadmap approach is going to be from where they are at a departmental level to then serve the enterprise as they increase their BI maturity.

Third, which is key, is with this collaboration, with this business and with a clearly defined BI strategy, they can justify the enterprise scope and the spending for the business intelligence initiatives with the buy-in of the business across the organization.

Now from a business perspective or line of business perspective, they can expand their line of business contributions to leverage what other organizations are doing both from an information sharing and common business language perspective as well as sharing the needs and best practices across the departments and pain points to understand where they can reuse this information.

Finally once they have a consolidated business approach, they now have better governance over their data, they have a better process to understand what we mean by profit versus what you mean by profits or a common business language and they can more quickly get insight to information across the business.