Accelerating BI Transformation to Empower Business Intelligence

What is Business Intelligence?

Business intelligence must be the one business input whose age is catching up with it (BI). Two-dimensional charts and spreadsheets, which were once ubiquitous and still cluttered the desks of production managers, sales managers, procurement executives, and financial chiefs, are quickly being phased out. Advanced dashboards, visualizations, reports, and query engines are taking their place. These tools are old. Within the realm of IT professionals at large organizations, they have existed for some time. 

However, they are now accessible to company executives, proprietors of small businesses, and pretty much anybody interested in learning about market trends, identifying business issues and opportunities, improving decision-making, and increasing operational effectiveness.

Changing Technology

BI is evolving more quickly than ever. Technology trends, including Cloud, Mobility, Big Data, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, and Analytics, are propelling this transition. The need for user data and insights is increasing simultaneously so that competition heats up and regulations tighten (especially in industries such as BFSI, Retail, and HLS). Legacy technology is the roadblock to keeping up with this rate of change.

The demand exceeds the systems and platforms implemented six to seven years ago. These systems lack scalability and flexibility, are challenging to integrate with other modern applications, have high maintenance costs, and have no end-of-life support for many of them. These are indications that it’s time to alter your BI platform.

Framework of BI Transformation

Consolidation and standardization have unquestionable benefits. Considering BI consolidation and comprehensively addressing governance, standardization, and simplification procedures with reliable migration frameworks, tools, and accelerators are essential for a successful BI transformation. The final product should be a flexible, extendable, and customized BI platform. Organizations must follow four easy actions to accomplish this:

1. Choosing and standardizing the right tools:

Collaborate with your IT and business heads to identify current, and future BI demands. This aids in selecting the appropriate technology stacks and combining BI into a single, top-tier BI platform. When the tools are chosen, they also aid in defining the government that surrounds them. Because there are fewer BI tools, there is an immediate improvement in data trustworthiness of 20 to 25%, and the TCO is reduced by 30% due to lower support, maintenance, and governance costs.

2. Rationalizing report:

Using many BI platforms may result in a load of reports within the company, leaving any system to monitor their usefulness. Organizations must document their reports inventory with an automated process of identifying similar or duplicate documents in a structured way. This can help in the identification and rationalization of unused and useless reports. Studies have shown that 40-50% of reports found for rationalization and elimination are responsible for reducing generation and maintenance costs by up to 25%.

3. Transforming platform:

Platform transformation has two components: change management from a user perspective and technology migration. To speed up time to market and guarantee low mistake rates, it is best to establish a framework for migration that includes automation. It is essential to extract metadata from current systems and map it to the target platform. Data transformation from your system to any destination system of your choice should be possible. Additionally, it is advised to implement change management procedures as soon as possible by explaining to users the technical advantages, raising awareness of the simplification, and minimizing user discomfort.

4. Governance and roadmap:

Governance (policies and processes) and a roadmap are components of a robust BI Transformation Plan. Users, organizational process maturity, and technology adoption all need to be in alignment with these. For instance, based on industry/regulatory needs, technological environments, and governance processes, on-premise, cloud, and hybrid models will each require a different governance strategy. It is impossible to overstate the importance of sound government. When they have effective governance, many firms see a 20% increase in benefits realization.

Final Thought

Organizations are starting a BI Transformation journey to benefit from new technology. Businesses are switching from historical reporting to planning and forecasting to spot and take advantage of new opportunities. Organizations will continue to be vulnerable to underachieving on the crucial strategic plan of business intelligence unless efforts and investments towards standardization and consolidation increase organizations’ priority charts.