How to Develop an Effective BI Strategy Roadmap

Updated 20 Apr 2023
Published 14 Apr 2023
Nancy Bhargava 2615 Views
business intelligence roadmap

When you are building your business, it is essential that you have a roadmap to creating a successful venture. This is attained by proper capital investment and a process deployment plan backed by a robust Business Intelligence strategy.

Whether you are a large company or a small startup, you might need a business strategy model because it can help you greatly in flourishing your business and understanding the various important factors that can make a difference. Also, these will help you attain the goal you set for your business when you started it.

Let us understand what exactly business strategy is and why businesses need it to establish themselves in the market.

What is a Business Intelligence strategy?

Before you dive into the details, let us understand what exactly the what is business intelligence and business intelligence roadmap mean. The specifics of strategy can be defined only when we understand what exactly is a Business Intelligence strategy. As the name states, Business Intelligence strategy is using business-critical technology and strategy to analyze data to offer actionable insights to achieve business goals.

This means that you take into account the performance of the company in the previous months, and the current results, and predict future performance based on certain analyzes and strategies that can improve the overall performance ratio.

Now, this is important because it gives you an essential outlook on how the company has been doing through all these times, what strategies went right, and what needs to be changed or to be worked on.

Another important concept here is the Business Intelligence lifestyle that takes into account everything a business needs to flourish and shows the exact turning points of the business.

Businesses need to understand and align themselves with market trends so that they can perform better and keep their performance up. The BI strategies and goals need to align so that they can generate data through it and understand the possible outcomes in the future.

So basically, a Business Intelligence strategy is a Business Intelligence roadmap or a blueprint for how to use the data of all the sections in your company and utilize it to better your business over time.

The data comes from various sectors, which accumulate to run the company into a profitable area, and these disparate sources from around the business include sectors like human resources, supply chain, finance, manufacturing, customer relationship management, and many others.

A successful Business Intelligence strategy includes the people, the technology, and all the processes.

Thus, we can also say that a BI strategy adds a lot of value to a company as it helps in giving them a structured and detailed program. The company can use this data to improve the model and the data tools.

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Why Do Companies Need a Business Intelliegence Strategy?

The underlying idea behind Business Intelligence is to collect, store, utilize, and analyze the data from various disparate sections of a business to improve its performance at different levels.

When you are running a business, the primary idea would be to boost the performance so that maximum revenue is generated and for this, you will need to set attainable goals for your workers and appoint proper guidelines on how to reach those goals in time.

Now let’s say you want a profit increment of 5% in the next fiscal year, then you will need to focus on how to use the resources and improve efficiency so that you can achieve the 5% profit in the next fiscal year.

BI best practices include mining the data of the past years to uncover the large data sets trends and report this analytical report to make inferences on the data and its impact on the performance and growth of the company.

This is done to benchmark future efforts against past performances and use Business intelligence tools to help uncover costly supply chain distributors, the units that have been underperforming, and conclusive performance data so that you can grow your business.

Therefore, a Power BI consulting company provides useful insights on how to manage your data, analyze it for market competition, report, and make conscious decisions for the business based on these insights.

The Main Elements of BI Strategy

The key idea of a successful BI strategy is practicing data and trend analysis on factors that impact business and its underlying goals. Some common elements include:

Effective elements of power BI Strategy

1. Having a Vision

The Business Intelligence vision is made to define expectations, as it includes everything that the participants of the vision agree on. The vision is to have a proper goal and analyze the data to reach that goal.

2. Manpower

Manpower is important when you are making a business strategy because there are a lot of things that humans can do which cannot be taken over by AI or even by tools.

Having manpower simplifies your process because each section can take care of its own departments and you will get an aggregate result that you can use to analyze the profits.

Educating the workers on the ROI and how the strategy is going to help your business is important as they can get more focus and you will get result-driven participation.

3. Process

The process of documentation is important because this shows the trends of the market and how your company has aligned its goals along the trends. Also, this helps in understanding the gaps that might have caused a potential drop in revenue which you can overcome in the next fiscal year.

4. Architecture

Architecture is important for many reasons as having a proper infrastructure will help you give your workers all those facilities that are required for the company to grow well.

This also means that your Business Intelligence strategy will require metadata, data requirements, integration, security requirements, and software integration.

5. Tools

Tools are the software that makes a lot of manual processes simpler so that you save a lot of time and resources and focus on expanding the business. There are a lot of tools and software that support the BI strategy and you just need to identify and find the tools that can help your company with your strategy.

Know more: Top 11 Power BI Consulting Companies In 2023

Steps to Create a Business Intelligence Strategy

There are various steps that can help you create a successful Business Intelligence strategy and then this guide for Power BI can help you fulfill your business goals.

Steps to Create a Business Intelligence Strategy

#1. Assessing the Present BI Ecosystem

Reviewing the company’s data is important from the entry-level and this is because some companies have proper analytical tools that can help in modeling, understanding the statistics, and data visualization.

These are really helpful in getting real-life customer data which can act as a good starting point if you are creating a fresh Business Intelligence strategy.

#2. BI Maturity Model

The BI maturity model showcases the maturity of BI in the company on a five-pointer scale. This scale shows how disorganized or optimized you are with levels from the bottom to the top including disorganized, emerging, standardizing, assimilation, and optimized.

The lowest level shows how scattered you are, while the highest level reflects the perfection of BI maturity. Mostly this part is handled by a CDO or a chief data officer who can use the data to make conscious decisions.

#3. Project Sponsor

The project sponsor is an executive sponsor who supports this BI model and the goals that come with it. This is to ensure that the company has a proper compliance status and the project is getting sponsorship and support. They also ensure that in case the goal of the project changes, then everyone is still in consensus with the same.

#4. Identifying Key Stakeholders

Determining that everyone is affected by the Business Intelligence strategy that you are developing can help you understand the key stakeholders who can influence or have an interest in the ongoing plans.

#5. Employing a CDO

A CDO or a Chief Data Officer is the professional who takes the ultimate responsibility of analyzing the data. The primary function of a CDO is to manage the data, check the data quality and observe if the BI strategy is in line with the data.

If you are a large-scale company, then having a CDO is a very good investment as you do not lose sight of your needs and goals.

#6. Determining the BI Objectives

It doesn’t matter if your objective is to cut down on expenses or create exciting opportunities, all of this comes under the section of determining the whole objective of creating a Business Intelligence strategy.

#7. Building a Data Map

Data maps show the data landscape and what the data means in the immediate BI strategy. Basically, when you integrate data from various sources, then you build a map to showcase the schemes and the model results. So, this is included in the data type.

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#8. Choosing the BI Tools & Platforms

BI platform offers the users opportunities to analyze, report and dashboards and integrate the software systems and the datasets.

So, when you are selecting a new system then you need to consider the technical compatibility with regards to the relation of your present plans and understand the capabilities like reporting and custom dashboards.

#9. Preparing the Data Infrastructure

The infrastructure includes three common sections- the Business Intelligence architecture, the data that is collected, and the integration plan for the collected data.

Modern Business Intelligence strategies enable the user to bring data from the various areas of the business, and architecture is developed based on the business data sources. All of this knowledge essentially helps you to integrate various data sets and systems.

#10. Establishing a BI Governance Process

The governance process essentially shows how the business is managing the information systems so governance includes leadership, policy as well as operations. A good governance process ensures that the business is sustainable which is the primary goal for any business that they can sustain on themselves.

#11. Determining the Key Performance Indicators

Key performance indicators essentially help in understanding if the BI strategy formulated is aligning with the company’s goals.

Developing a Roadmap for Business Intelligence

This helps the stakeholders (which are mostly customers) to understand all the essential processes that take place for a successful BI strategy to come into motion with a very easy-to-understand visual.

Developing a Roadmap for Business Intelligence

  • Documenting the Business Strategy

The documentation is done basically to keep the project goals in mind so that the team cannot go astray from the definite goals. Also, proper documentation helps stakeholders to keep more trust in the business and its strategies.

  • UAT Or User Acceptance Training

As the last part of software development, this process includes the first-time users who use the system and verify if it even works properly

  • End User Training

The end users of a BI strategy are the decision makers who need this data to guide their actions and train the end users for the programs, processing, and documentation.

  • Tracking ROI

ROI is important because this is what defines if the strategy is working in your favor and if you can keep your business afloat. Delivering a higher ROI means that your business is aligning with the Business Intelligence strategy and the organizational goals. Calculate the value of this by reducing the time in data collection and analysis and making a conscious decision on the same.

  • Annual BI Strategy Review

Reviewing the BI maturity model every year ensures that you are staying on track with the model and goals. The quantitative metrics give a great idea of how this works and the data shows if the model is working towards the benefit of the company.

Know more: Benefits of Power BI for Industries

How to Document a Business Strategy?

Making a high-level goal and technical specialization-filled strategy is a good way to document a BI strategy. Now you will need the executive sponsors to sign it and then show how it integrates with the company’s strategy a comprehensive BI strategy document covers:

  • Executive Summary: This is an introduction to describe the need and plan for the strategy
  • Aligning that with the corporate strategy: It shows that the bI strategy is aligning with the company’s goals
  • Project scopes and immediate requirements: these give the details of the goals and limitations and if there are any additional design requirements.
  • Governance Team: That creates a BICC team that consists of people who are associated with and involved in the BI efforts.
  • Assessment: The end of the state is mostly used as a reference point for the staff and the management team to assess the project.
  • Business Intelligence Roadmap: A roadmap brings the trust of the stakeholders who invest in the company as they see a definite set of goals toward the ultimate idea of the project’s initiation.
  • Technology: The BI architecture and software users that are included in the strategy.
  • Data management: Managing and integrating the data, including having information on the data dictionaries and governance.
  • Management: Implementing operations and reporting changes and documenting them.

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The Benefits of BI Strategy

Business Intelligence strategy comes with a lot of factors, and getting the proper software for the tools is just the beginning. You need to identify the data and then generate that to manage your business.

It is not just using platforms but also using the data for faster implementation and more varied reports based on the Power BI dashboard visuals. BI strategy models boost the revenue of the company and improve employee performance because it gives a very real data view of what the company has been doing or performing and what it needs to do to perform even better.

With a proper BI strategy, reporting and analysis are faster, so decision taken based on the data generated is also faster, saving a lot of time and resources. The insights front of the data generated can be very useful in creating a roadmap to attain the company’s goals. Moreover, a proper BI strategy model mitigates the risks of various dangers the employees or other market factors pose.

In Conclusion

A proper BI strategy is more than just a technological initiative to improve your company’s performance. There is a lot that goes into making a solid BI strategy model and the development of the company post-strategy is immense. From revenue boost to increase in sponsors, a good plan, if adhered to, brings a lot of profit to the company.

FAQs Related to the BI Strategy Roadmap

        • Why is Business Intelligence Strategy Important for a Business?

          This is because it is a blueprint or a road map with small attainable goals, that will pave the way for achieving the ultimate business goals.

        • Can I Use a BI Model for my Startup?

          BI strategies are mostly used by large-scale companies, as they need a lot of factors to come into function. But even for small startups, a BI model is important and can be of great help when you are looking for expansion.

        • What are the Key Components of a BI Strategy?

          The key components of a BI strategy include assessing an organization’s data sources, data quality, data governance, and data management practices. Other equally important components are the identification of key business metrics, selection of BI tools and technologies, and implementation plans and strategies for ongoing monitoring and refinement.

      • How Do you Measure the Success of a BI Strategy?

        BI strategy success can be measured in a number of ways, including improved decision-making, increased operational efficiency, increased revenue or profitability, and improved customer satisfaction.

Nancy Bhargava

Nancy works as an IT consulting professional with Arka Softwares. She has an in-depth knowledge of trending tech and consumer affairs. She loves to put her observations and insights of the industry to reveal interesting stories prompting the latest domain practice and trends.

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