Assess the IQ of your BI tool
Business intelligence has evolved over the years. It’s now a suite of smart solutions and data management services through very smart visualisation, fuelled by a strong and robust data infrastructure.
In today’s world of digitisation, all data is big data, and every day you harness and add new data streams to make your data lakes more enriched. Organisations seek tech partners and deploy solutions to build connected data marts, lakes for all sources together. And then one house a smart BI solution on it to give real-time change in metrics: Be its advertising receptivity or social media engagement or product-oriented features along with supply chain and distribution monitoring, and finally the shifts in sales, new customer acquisition and change in market shares etc.
Today, one deploys or employs the best in class infrastructure, and ingest real-time data streams, but what matters is the ability to connect all the dots and giving you insights to fuel your daily decisions. How do you make your systems smart to go beyond the correlation of few parameters?
There are reports and studies that show the companies that invest disproportionality in data intelligence and analytics solutions outperform their peers in sales by delivering almost 57–75% higher ROIs
Hence, It’s really important to know- the IQ of your Business Intelligence tool. Can it really predict my business outcomes with good accuracy? What powers my visualisation dashboard? How does one react to the changing real-time graphs on the large screens? How to read between the lines in your daily business health reports and much more. We often see these reports but mostly don’t react in real-time due to limitations of our BI tool.
The question always remains — So What & What Next?
Technological advancements have made it possible to have advanced computers in your pockets through smart mobiles. The web-based applications and internet has made it possible to have driverless cars, control your home appliances and temperatures from anywhere across the world to mention a few. You can even write complex codes in programming languages, should you give the right command to the system.
Smart dashboarding is only an aid to the ultimate decision-makers. But one needs those BI-tools with real smart analytical engines powered by highly advanced algorithmic solutions to determine and predict the future, as they are the true decision enablers. Tools that learn and simulate millions of scenarios using machines/ computers and their advanced computational power, which is otherwise not humanly possible.
Hence it’s all the more important, for one to know the IQ of your business intelligence tool that empowers your business growth.
The IQ of the BI is usually measured by its ability to provide following answers:
- Real-time thresholds and benchmarks: Fast changing environment needs dynamic computations to measure and update the thresholds and not static. Highlight and capture a shift in environment early on to prepare for the future and mitigate risk.
- Diagnostics & measure: How good is it to measure the causality? Can the tool capture the impact and synergy of different parameters from data sources that impact the business metrics?
- Prescriptive power of the tool: Helps you build hypotheses and provide scenarios with tests and outcomes with a high level of accuracy (90–95%+) for future projections in real-time.
Having used diverse BI tools across most big sectors and in both developed and emerging economies, I’m summarising the power of your BI tool basis what it enables. There are 4 big component and each has been rated with its contribution to build an agile future and culture in any organisation
- Smart Dashboarding (23%) — If your business has good smart dashboarding solutions then the IQ of BI system is close to 23%
- Dynamic Computation (24%) — If you have built dynamic algorithms on top of your dashboards to compute thresholds and benchmarks and have an inbuilt alert systems, then it enhances the power of your BI system by another 24%
- Advanced Causality (18%) — we are usually challenged by not having the causalities between all the input and outcome metrics. We don’t know what has contributed to rise or fall of your growth and how to course correct in almost real-time. By adding this module in your BI, you increase the usefulness and power of your product by another 18%.
- Predictive Power (35%) — But the most important part is to make your product absolutely agile by giving it the wings of Predicting future with accuracy. This enhancement in your infrastructure allows you to assess anything at any point of time. And this adds remaining 35% effectiveness to your BI tool to make it almost 100% agile and ready to test any hypothesis you may have.
There are few more subsegments in this and we have put together a detailed score card to test and evaluate your current BI systems.
Finally, you evaluate your systems basis your scores — Evaluate your Business Intelligence tool IQ and see if it is smart enough to guide you to make the right decisions.
