Making Business Intelligence Work for You
Business Intelligence (BI) is a top priority for many companies. Used effectively, it can drive insights into customer behavior, pinpoint new market opportunities, optimize marketing spend, leverage competitive intelligence, and more. Because of the obvious benefits, most companies have evolved from an attitude of “Should I utilize business intelligence?” to “How do I get the most out of business intelligence?”
Yes, choosing BI is a wise move. But once you’ve made the decision to invest, how should you proceed? How can you ensure that you get the most from your investment? How do you make BI work for you?
Three Approaches for Successful BI Strategies
Over the past decade working with hundreds of customers to enhance their business value, SAP has seen three successful approaches to getting companies started with BI:
1) Holistic BI Strategy
In this approach, you take a step back and evaluate your entire BI strategy in the context of your business. You’ll need to identify your business vision, strategies, and related growth initiatives and ensure alignment between your vision and your infrastructure needs. Execute by creating a long-term project roadmap and prioritizing your BI spending.
2) Focused Analytic Solution
If you have a high-value business use case already identified, consider developing an initial analytic solution targeting it. This approach addresses immediate business needs, while creating an opportunity to showcase your success to other parts of the business.
For this focused approach – for example, with a visualization quick start – you’ll need to analyze four key areas:
3) Architecture Framework
For some IT executives, this is the logical place to start. Begin by determining your infrastructure requirements and gaining an initial technical understanding of the tools you will be deploying. Such a framework will help you better support the business as you get into the planning and implementation stages. You’ll need to systematically assess:
Any of these three options can be an effective starting point; the choice comes down to where your business is now, and what is required for it to be successful. Regardless of where you start, though, you can – and should – expand to take advantage of one or both of the other options as your BI footprint matures. Perhaps you want to start with an analytic solution to show success, then once that succeeds, drive more sponsorship into a full BI strategy. Or maybe you want to begin by developing your architecture framework as you get your IT story in place, then embark on an analytic solution that solves a specific use case. There are many approaches to BI – ultimately, it’s your business, and your decision.
Every day, SAP Services helps companies work through critical business decisions like these. Watch our latest World Tour presentation Decide Better: Best Practices with Business Intelligence given by Tom Kurtz, Global Practice Director HANA Services at SAP Consulting at http://tinyurl.com/3za6kmw.
To learn more about how we can help ensure that BI delivers maximum benefits for your business, visit us at www.sap.com/services.
What approach to BI has worked for your organization?
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