Business Intelligence and Analytics: Improving Your Competency

title=Implementing the Five Levels of BI} 

Implementing the five levels of BI
 

Many companies get caught up in day-to-day tactical operations and fail to exploit the wealth in their existing data. The reason often stems from the short-term mentality of putting out today's fires and forgoing strategic, longer-term initiatives. According to the aforementioned survey, the top three roadblocks to improving BI within companies are organizational issues:

1. Lack of understanding of how to use analytics,

2. Lack of management bandwidth due to competing priorities, and

3. Lack of skills internally.

With commitment and planning, your company can gain access to this critical BI that will ultimately give you the knowledge to take your company to the next level.

The first step involves confirming your data availability, credibility and history. Some well-intentioned companies casually discard data after four to six months to save on IT storage costs. However, with inexpensive terabyte drives now commonly available and used in PCs, this is now rarely an issue of expense.

Optimally, multiple years of data should be leveraged to adequately identify and analyze seasonal patterns. However, even one year of data can produce trends and patterns before unseen.

Often, isolated islands of BI competency at different levels of evolution spring up across organizations, depending on their specific business needs and available expertise. A solid corporate capability to analyze and leverage enterprise data is becoming critical to optimizing business performance in today's competitive environment.