The business intelligence industry has expanded exponentially in recent years and is expected to continue growing. If you want to make the most of data analysis in an established or newly adopted BI system, your team should be data-driven. According to Thelosen, having clearly defined goals and committing to a data culture are essential. Businesses should focus on why and how they are using data. With these objectives in mind, leaders can form a plan for BI use and include their team, establishing a data culture.
Thelosen outlined three components of a data culture: a top-down commitment to analytics, a bottom-up commitment to analytics and education.
The top-down and bottom-up commitments to data culture essentially revolve around involving the whole team in business intelligence. Upper management should include dashboards in presentations and company-wide message distribution, while lower-level departments should make a point to use data in everyday processes. Thelosen recommends having a “data champion” on each team, so every department is focused on incorporating business intelligence into workflows.
BI software will become more user-friendly as the industry grows. This growth will also drive a more knowledgeable user base. But along with these improvements, business leaders need to take on the responsibility of educating their workforce. “We can’t just expect everybody to be data-driven. It’s like we can’t just expect everybody to fly a helicopter. We need to provide education on how to do it,” said Thelosen. Beyond technical training, it is necessary to inform employees of tangible business objectives for data and how the software can achieve those objectives.
Data “Proactivity” – More Passive Users
Eventually, you get to a place where business intelligence work doesn’t have to be jump-started by human users anymore. Instead, you’re more likely to passively receive this intelligence than you are to go looking for it in a report or even on a dashboard. This is data proactivity: information brought to you. This may be as simple as important data points being more prominent in a visualization or as advanced as notifications providing direct answers.
Up to this point, companies have been widely trumpeting innovation in their visual dashboard designs. Features like more sophisticated charting and graphing have become paramount, and data visualization has become the watchword.
A 2011 Quora post by Jason Kolb shows emphasis on this trend has been building for a while.
“Relevant data will find you, and not vice versa,” Kolb wrote. Kolb references trends like real-time deep analysis and more personalized data several years prior to the current marketplace. We’re already seeing some of these AI types of advances deliver rich data to consumers and business users.
In the upcoming year, “40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by cognitive/AI capabilities, providing timely critical insights for new operating and monetization models,” predicts the International Data Corporation.
The concept of data proactivity is directly related to third-party program integrations and AI. To put it simply, all of these features offer the benefit of providing answers based on your business’ stored data. Whether you directly engage the system or not, an intuitive tool will bring the answers to you.
Source: SelectHub