BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

Traditionally, Wikipedia defines “Business Intelligence” (“BI”) as comprising the strategies, technologies, and tools used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information, with BI technologies providing historical, current, and predictive views of business operations. It involves the collection, aggregation, and analysis of data from various sources, including structured and unstructured data.

Vistrada’s BI Consulting practice believes that while the ability to access and analyze data are foundational cornerstones of BI, the true business value comes from the ability to derive actionable insights and make optimal business decisions based on that information. We feel this is the best definition of what BI capabilities and solutions should provide.

BI is critical for allowing an organization to maximize the use of data and information available to them for driving maximum business value, effectively increasing revenue and profit while decreasing the costs required to deliver those gains.

Companies today are inundated with data, both from internal and external sources. Yet, they often cannot harness and make sense of all that information to enable them to monetize the value of what they have. There are also significant costs involved in capturing and maintaining this data that further erode their margins. A sound BI strategy and program provide the foundation to organize, structure, and access this data so that it can be presented in a meaningful and actionable way to allow your company's leadership to make optimal business decisions to maximize the value and profitability of the organization.

In summary, if planned for and executed properly, BI allows you to do “more with less,” leveraging available data and resources to deliver the right information at the right time to make the best decisions for your organization.

The benefits of executing a successful BI program are significant and include the following:

• Consolidation of data/information from multiple, siloed sources for easier, faster access via dashboards and reports

• Improved BI data quality and lower maintenance costs

• Ability to leverage data/information to analyze, understand, gain insights, and make better-informed and more accurate business decisions

• Improved alignment between key performance metrics and organizational priorities.

• Optimized, efficient utilization of company resources resulting in improved business performance, based on increased revenues, lower support costs, and higher profit margins.

The ecosystem of BI tools, software, solutions, and technologies can be quite broad.  BI solutions consist of multiple components, including:

• Reporting

• Visualization

• Analytics

• Data Ingestion (“ETL” / “ELT”)

• Data Architecture and Design

• Database

• Machine Learning Libraries

• Data Quality and Governance

Leading technology vendor platforms across these BI components include:

• Reporting / Visualization / Analytics – Tableau; Microsoft Power BI; Qlik; Domo; OBIEE

• Data Ingestion – Informatica; Microsoft SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS); IBM Infosphere Datastage; Python; SQL; PL/SQL; T-SQL

• Data Architecture and Design –  ER/Studio; Erwin Data Modeler; SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS); InfoSphere; Lucidchart; Draw.io

• Database –  Microsoft SQL Server; Oracle; MySQL; PostgreSQL; IBM DB2; Snowflake; Microsoft Azure; Amazon Web Services; Google Cloud Platform

• Machine Learning Libraries – scikit-learn, TensorFlow, PyTorch, Orange Data Mining
  

• Data Quality and Governance – Collibra, Talend Data Quality
  

Although each project can have its scope of issues, some common BI implementation challenges can include the following:

• Data Quality and Integration – due to incomplete, missing, or outdated information.

• Scope Management and Expectation Alignment – caused by project expansion and 'scope creep' leading to delays, budget overruns, and diversions from core objective diversions.

• Data Privacy and Security – when data accessibility conflicts with data protection and regulatory compliance.

• Tool Complexity and Technical Integration Hurdles – when existing BI tools are hard to use and aren’t seamlessly integrated with your IT infrastructure, databases, and other systems.

• Scalability and Technology Evolution – caused by industry changes, organizational growth, or evolving technological trends.

Business Intelligence (BI) consulting is a service that examines and improves an organization’s internal and external data quality to strengthen operational efficiency, decision-making, customer experience, and overall performance.

While accessing and analyzing data is pivotal for a successful BI solution, Vistrada takes it a step further by uncovering key actionable insights that help make better business decisions based on that data.

Hiring a business intelligence consulting service provider allows an organization to benefit from the years of cross-industry experience and lessons learned that a consultancy has gained by focusing on this space.  These providers also offer dedicated resources to help an organization expedite the speed and effectiveness of its BI initiatives which may not be possible with your internal resources.  BI consulting service providers can enable a wide range of outcomes to support your organization’s BI efforts and deliver the benefits you are seeking to achieve, such as:

• Data consolidation from multiple sources and faster access with easier-to-use dashboards and reports

• Improved data quality with lower maintenance costs

• Better analytics and derived insights to support more informed decisions

• Increased alignment between key performance metrics and organizational goals

• Improved business performance and profitability due to efficient utilization of company resources and reliance on data-driven strategies.
  
  

Along with a combination of technical, business, and soft skills, Business Intelligence consultants should possess the following expertise:

• Business and Industry Knowledge – Experience with past projects within similar industries, addressing company size, pain points, and objectives.

• Technological Expertise – Proficiency in data analysis, statistics, data mining, complex databases, algorithms, machine learning, predictive analytics, etc.

• Data Governance, Security, and Compliance – Experience navigating industry-specific regulations and compliance protocols.

• Change Management – Effective strategies to help organizations navigate planning, implementation, and organizational BI changes.

• Data Visualization and Communication – Creating interactive dashboards using visualization tools with Tableau, Power BI, and other leading BI visualization tools.

BI consultants can analyze the following data types:

• Customer – Data about your customers and prospects, whether business entities or individuals, e.g., CRM data, customer contacts, customer activity

• Sales – Data about your sales process and activities, such as sales revenue, deals, opportunities/pipeline, sales team planning, contracts

• Transactional – Data about core business transactions of the company, e.g., product purchases, call data for a call center, trip data for a driving service

• Financial – Your own company’s internal financial data, assets/liabilities, GL/AP/AR, M&A, etc.

• Product / Supply Chain – Data about your company’s products or services, e.g., descriptions, inventory, materials, vendors

• Corporate Strategy – Data about your company’s strategic plans and efforts, e.g., strategic data, marketing campaigns

• Employee/HR – Data about your company’s employees, talent management payroll, e.g., HCM data

• Technical – Data about your company’s technology platforms/servers/networks, its codebase, etc.

• Digital Data – Data collected from websites, social media platforms, and online interactions.

• A comprehensive and well-thought-out Enterprise Data Management (EDM) strategy

• A robust data model and architecture

• Centralized data storage with supporting Extract, Transform, Load (ETL) integration architecture

• A Reporting & Dashboarding platform that is appropriate to meet your needs

• Conduct workshops to understand and validate the BI business context

• Identify key performance metrics for driving business goals

• Evaluate current workflows and decision processes

• Extract pivotal information with targeted interviews

• Create initial reporting and dashboard prototype

• Validate the effectiveness of identified metrics

• Confirm that selected decisions and behavior processes are driving desired results

• Determine whether the reports and dashboard provide pivotal data in a comprehensive format to make important business decisions

• Ensure the BI initiative can be integrated into day-to-day decision-making processes