Verify Pressure for Change (Complete)
Successful BI deployments are driven by a pressure to change. Only when the opportunity associated with better decisions or the pain of poor data management is clearly recognized will enough pressure exist to go the distance with a BI solution.
Dedicate Resources
Even with Software as a Service (SaaS) BI solutions, which are easily provisioned on-demand and more quickly deployed, BI requires data cleansing, data staging and transfer, and integrating and consolidating data from a number of usually disparate information systems and technologies. These tasks will certainly benefit from subject matter expertise and technical talent on the IT team.
Identify Data Sources
After identifying what data is needed, create an inventory of data sources.
Determine Granularity
Extract data at the lowest level possible that creates value in reporting to the organization (cost center).
Relate Data Sources
Tie savings to spend and budget. Support chargebacks.
Clean/Rationalize Data
Sample each of your data sources early in order to determine data quality and allow for the needed time to scrub and enrich the data before it’s imported to the data warehouse.
Build portal and Create Presentations
Build standardized, parameterized reports and filtered dashboards. Consider customized URLs where appropriate.
Harden environment
Create enhanced security and limit user access to select individuals and groups.
Pursue a Phased Approach
Grant information dissemination to more people, or increase cross-functional information exchange among more lines of business. The goal is to democratize BI analysis throughout the business.
Measure and Refine
Measurement should begin by actively tracking staff utilization of the BI tools. User adoption will grow over time so tracking who’s accessing the tools and the volume of users over time will provide an early indicator toward ROI.
Raise The Bar
- Deploy Power BI.
- Step up to predictive modeling and analysis. This type of analysis uses technology to discover hidden patterns and support ‘what-if’ scenarios or pro forma modeling. Being able to accurately forecast the effects of new or proposed efforts is a powerful tool in allocating budget and scarce resources among competing alternatives.
- Add additional third party data
- Let the computers do the data manipulation so staff can be dedicated to higher level intellectual and
- analytical tasks.
Determine The Most Salient Metrics