Business Intelligence

5 Pitfalls to Avoid with Your Business Intelligence

Business intelligence is a great tool that can help your enterprise overcome many challenges, but it’s not without a certain risk. For your business to truly benefit from data analysis, your enterprise needs to transcend these potential shortcomings of business intelligence. To this end, we’re here to help you understand a few common mishaps faced when implementing business intelligence and how you can overcome these problems with relative ease.

Most business intelligence applications fail due to one simple reason: transparency – or rather, the sudden amount of transparency that true, real time data reporting offers. Your enterprise needs to consider the following regarding transparency and accountability in order to prevent business intelligence from becoming a liability or risk to your business model.

1. The Majority of Data Isn’t Helpful
You might collect plenty of data from both within and outside of your enterprise, but the sad reality is that most of this data will be unusable. It’s estimated that around 85% of statistics that you collect won’t be usable or are simply inaccurate. This could be for a number of reasons, but the primary one is that enterprises might feel rushed to implement new procedures, and in their haste, they forsake accuracy of data in favor of the perceived image of progress. Furthermore, if data isn’t accurate and processes are implemented anyway, you run the risk of implementing them wrong, which means even more wasted time and revenue. Therefore, it’s critical that you ensure data quality for any business intelligence initiative.

2. Data Can Be Altered
If you’re not using an automated business intelligence solution for your enterprise, it’s important to note that data can easily be changed to misrepresent the truth. Let’s say that you’re counting on seeing some great numbers for a recent project, and the employee’s job rides on the success of it. They might be tempted to fudge the numbers a bit in order to lessen the blow of a failed project. However, this helps no one, and it certainly doesn’t help your organization. The importance of transparency and accountability cannot be ignored for any business intelligence application.

3. Business Intelligence Enforces Accurate Reporting
Unlike manual methods of data gathering and reporting, business intelligence takes advantage of automated reporting that can’t easily be tampered with. Your ultimate goal should be to implement a BI system that uses a dashboard to distribute important (and relevant) data. If you can successfully implement a great business intelligence solution, you’ll be able to improve communication, create efficient processes, and gain incredible advantages over your competition.

4. Bypass the Negatives of Business Intelligence
While it’s important to remain cognizant of the disadvantages of business intelligence, you can’t let these distract you from the immense opportunity represented by it. After all, if you ignore a rock because of its rough features, you might miss out on finding a glimmering geode on the inside. Business intelligence technology has the potential to change the way your enterprise functions on a fundamental level, and it’s a great opportunity to improve overall functionality and efficiency. Business intelligence can help your enterprise in the following ways:

  • Streamline daily operations: Business intelligence allows your organization to interpret data and apply various solutions in order to resolve issues that might otherwise remain hidden in plain sight.
  • Help departments collaborate: By allowing departments to access detailed reports and analytics, your enterprise can develop collaboration strategies and methods that best take advantage of its strengths.
  • Improve understanding of your industry: Statistics and analytics allow your enterprise to capture outside data, giving you the opportunity to change the way you deal with current clients or attract new markets.

5. User Acceptance is Key
It’s important that your enterprise adopt a culture of acceptance with business intelligence technology. After all, if your employees don’t accept business intelligence as something that makes their job easier, they will be more averse to using it. If they don’t even give business intelligence a chance, it can’t become an important part of operations, which puts your organization at a loss due to investing in something which isn’t providing value. In this case, being able to show results can be particularly helpful in swaying them to your cause. Provide them with real-life examples of how business intelligence has helped other businesses, and work with them to create a user-friendly BI experience. If it doesn’t complicate their current procedures and creates real results, they will have no choice but to adopt it as an accepted practice.

Does your enterprise want to implement a business intelligence strategy that maximizes accountability and allows your operations to flourish? If so, IronEdge Group can help. To learn more about business intelligence, reach out to us today.

George Sturrock