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In the last decade the advances in technology has had an impact on all organizations. One of the areas that is been affected is the decision-making process.  The rise of data processing abilities and increase in the number of digital tools available for an organization creates an opportunity, – but it also easy to get lost. 

New technologies bring about excess of information. This leaves decision makers piled with irrelevant, inadequate and inconsistent data. The ability of an organization to segregate meaningful and insightful data from inadequate and irrelevant data is what makes them stand out from their competition and succeed.

So, what does these organization have that others don’t?

What should organization focus on?

One of the areas that organizations can invest in is Business Intelligence. 

It is a broad category of applications and technologies for gathering, storing, analyzing data – via various solutions- that are optimized to meet the goals of the organization. These goals may range from operational goals that affect day to day operations, tactical goals which involve short term programs such marketing campaigns or strategic long-term goals of increasing revenue.

Are you asking the right questions?

Before jumping on the various tools and dataset available to help you in your decision making, you must first stop and ask yourself, 

“Am I asking the right questions?”.   

You should not just focus on the data and the vast information available, but to identify the important questions for your business. Then you can derive KPIs and metrics to answer these. Knowing the right questions to ask beforehand is vital, otherwise it will just lead to a clutter and overload of unnecessary information. 

In Gture we have used data to answer key questions related to the performance of the applications that we are building. Examples include: 

  1. What was the sales conversion rate for the last three months?
  2. How well are the assets utilized?
  3. Are our customers making it all the way through our member pipeline
  4. How many click “add to cart” on the website? 

These types of questions will help determine KPIs and give direction in the data exploration process. It also helps creating intuitive dashboards and reports with a clear message.

Pick the right tools

There are a lot of tools in the BI-sphere, both for storage, data management and reporting, and many have very similar capabilities. If the requirements are not too broad, common reporting tools will in our experience provide you with sufficient data management capabilities packaged with data visualization.   

One of the tools we use at Gture is Microsoft’s Power BI, which is a powerful data visualization analytics tool that is relatively easy to use. It allows us to connect to a database or a spreadsheet, transform the data (if required) and build intuitive reports and dashboards. These reports can be static by nature, generated upon request or be refreshed automatically through a scheduler. The objective here is to reduce the large data and present it efficiently and effectively.  

Tools like Power BI gives you a broad set of features: Dashboards that can be embedded on intranets or emails, intuitive visualizations (slicers, funnels, various charts etc) and interactive drill down functionality. It also has basic analytic and statistical capabilities, such as forecasting, outlier analysis and scenario simulations. You can receive advanced reports with option of providing it in real time. But most importantly it is an easy way to answer your critical business questions.   

In a nutshell Business Intelligence is a must in today’s competitive world. We live in an age full of rich data and the survivors are those who know how to best take advantage of it.

Felles

Author Felles

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