What Is the Best Way To Put Business Intelligence To Work?

Business intelligence (BI) is a pivotal cornerstone in today's data-driven environment. To maintain a competitive edge, companies in robust business hubs such as Chicago must harness the full potential of BI. However, what is the best way to put this powerful resource to work?

The best way to use BI depends on an organization's specific needs and goals. To guide you, we use our expertise as an analytics company in Chicago to detail the general steps you can follow.

• Know your objectives
• Collect your data
• Choose the right BI tools
• Create reports and dashboards
• Understand your data
• Share knowledge
• Refine initiatives
• Conquer challenges

Let’s go!

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1. Identifying Business Objectives

Businesses in Chicago must start their journey with business intelligence by defining their goals. They must understand what they want to achieve and how BI can help them. 

For instance, a Chicago-based online publisher might strive to enhance its search engine optimization (SEO). In this scenario, they can harness business intelligence to identify popular search terms, understand visitor behavior, or spot emerging content trends.

On the other hand, a delivery company can use BI to plan routes better, saving time and fuel. Knowing what the business wants to achieve guides the next steps and ensures the BI effort supports the company's overall strategy.

2. Collecting and Integrating Relevant Data

Once the business knows its goals, it can start gathering the right data, which can come from many places, such as internal tools and sales tracking systems. The data can also come from external sources such as social media or reports on competitors. 

Many different types of data exist that can be useful. Companies need to decide which is most important for their goals. After finding the data, they need to clean it up and put it together to ensure it is correct and ready for the BI tools to analyze.

3. Choosing the Right BI Tools

With goals set and data ready, businesses must pick the right BI tools, which need to:

• Be able to grow with the business,
• Be easy for all employees to use,
• Work well with the company's existing systems, and
• Present data in a way that is easy to understand and useful to make decisions.

Businesses have many different tools from which to choose, each with its own strengths. Some are better for businesses with big IT departments, while others are easier for people who are not tech experts. Some tools can predict future trends, which might not be necessary for a small business in Chicago that just needs to understand current data. 

Picking the right tool is not about finding the most powerful one; rather, it is about finding the one that best meets the company's needs. The right tool can make data easy to understand and use, helping businesses make smarter decisions.

4. Making Reports and Dashboards

Once a Chicago business picks the right BI tool, it must build reports and dashboards that clearly show important facts. These reports should focus on the information that matters to the business's goals. 

A beachfront hotel, for instance, wishes to analyze the influence of seasonality, local events, and weather on the occupancy rate of its rooms. Their reports should highlight this information. 

A dashboard should be simple to understand, providing a clear snapshot of the important facts. Visual elements such as charts, graphs, or maps can make complex data easy to understand and use.

5. Understanding Your Data

After creating reports and dashboards, businesses need to study and understand the data. This step is crucial in pulling useful insights from the raw information. 

Consider a digital marketing agency in Chicago that utilizes data-driven marketing. The agency might analyze customer behavior data to discern patterns of engagement or purchase. 

For instance, they might discover certain times of day when their client's target audience is most active online. They might also identify which marketing messages resonate most with different customer segments. Understanding these patterns arms businesses with the knowledge needed to make informed decisions, fueling growth and success. 

6. Sharing What You Learn

Once a business has learned something from its data, sharing this knowledge with everyone in the organization is crucial. Data sharing, with Chicago’s mix of small businesses and multinational corporations, can take many forms. 

For example, in a small design agency, the discussion of insights might occur during team meetings, thus directly affecting project decisions. In a bigger company, sharing insights might be through newsletters, presentations, or even special data-sharing platforms. All of the departments can benefit from this, from marketing to operations. 

Sharing insights encourages everyone to value and use BI, making a data-focused approach a crucial part of how the business works.

7. Overseeing and Refining Business Intelligence Initiatives

It is vital to remember that using business intelligence in a business is not a one-time event. It is an ongoing process that demands constant oversight and includes keeping track of key metrics, assessing how effectively the BI initiatives are meeting the set goals, and making necessary changes.

For instance, a Chicago-based retail business might start by using its BI tools to understand sales trends. After some time, it might see that it also needs to monitor its inventory to keep up with these trends. It then adjusts its BI efforts to gather and analyze this new data.

This monitoring and refining process helps ensure that business intelligence efforts remain relevant and beneficial. As the business grows and the market changes, the BI strategy should evolve to provide useful insights.

8. Conquering Challenges and Securing Success

Even with a well-planned strategy, businesses in Chicago can face challenges when implementing business intelligence. These obstacles might be technical or organizational. Some examples include dealing with data errors and getting everyone in the business to understand and use the BI tools.

To overcome these challenges, businesses need to prepare. They must provide training to help everyone understand the BI tools, creating a team responsible for maintaining data quality to prevent errors. Moreover, encouraging open communication about the BI process can catch problems early and keep everyone invested in the success of the BI initiatives.

Overcoming these hurdles is crucial to making business intelligence a valuable part of a Chicago business's decision-making process. It fosters a data-driven culture where everyone understands the power of information and uses it to help the business thrive.

Summing Up

Putting business intelligence to work effectively necessitates a thoughtful and considered  approach. It requires setting clear objectives and gathering relevant data, choosing the right tools, designing user-friendly reports, and fostering a culture of data-driven decision-making.

Getting started with business intelligence or improving existing initiatives might seem daunting. Yet with the right guidance, any Chicago business can harness the power of BI to drive growth and success. 

Are you ready to start your BI journey or take it to the next level? Partner with Digital Authority Partners. With our analytics and market-understanding expertise, we can help you make the most of your data. Contact us today.