Four Worst Practices in BI & Analytics for Business Users

Business Intelligence stands for applications, technologies, and practices for accumulating, integrating, surveying, and demonstrating business information. The aim of embedded analytics software is to assist in better decision-making.

By giving a holistic picture of the organization's performance, including historical patterns and real-time data analysis, embedded data analytics enables organizations to transform data into actionable insights and spur growth. Data warehousing, data mining, reporting, dashboards, and visualization are some of the essential elements of BI. BI aims to give organizations a single data integration, analysis, and visualization platform to support informed decision-making and promote corporate expansion. Businesses need BI to stay competitive in today's fast-paced corporate world. “Many business intelligence (BI) and analytics leaders are unsure how to get started with advanced analytics, and many organizations feel they must make a significant investment in new tools and skills” according to Gartner.

Companies can better comprehend how their business processes are carried out using BI tools. Beneficiaries of business intelligence systems range from experts in financial reporting, marketers, salespeople, supply chains, operations, and logistics to board members. Data warehouses, ETL tools, OLAP methods, and data mining are the core components of integrated environments known as Business Intelligence (BI) systems.

This notion also applies to various self-service BI software because sometimes our expectations may be higher than what we can foresee. According to studies on the subject, roughly 60% of the companies were happy with the success they had with BI.

Numerous difficulties, like choosing the wrong tool, making bad decisions during planning, and rollout errors that may jeopardize the effectiveness of BI, have plagued most firms. Even prosperous small organizations have to some extent, accepted that shelfware and breakdowns lead to BI project failure.

Top 4 Worst Practices in Business Intelligence

Worst practices can have an adverse effect on how embedded analytics software is implemented. First off, poor data quality and incorrect insights can result from ignoring the significance of data governance and failing to create clear data ownership and management. Second, if stakeholders and end users are not included in the BI implementation process, solutions may not be in line with business requirements and may not be adopted by the organization. Thirdly, adopting inadequate solutions and low user acceptance can result from depending entirely on technology to address business issues and ignoring the significance of change management. Fourthly, ignoring the value of data integration and failing to clean, harmonize, and integrate data from many sources might result in false conclusions and impaired judgment. Finally, failing to consider the BI solutions' long-term scalability and maintenance might result in a lack of sustainability and the requirement for ongoing upgrades and replacements. Organizations may ensure the successful installation of BI solutions that promote business growth and enhance performance by avoiding these worst practices.

The Inability of the Business to Operationalize BI Insights

The capacity to strategically use the information to match behaviors and anticipated outcomes is referred to in the business as operational insights. While BI provides essential insights that reveal crucial facts, it doesn't offer instructions on translating those insights into actions. This ultimately rests with the business users; it could have adverse effects if they don't properly understand and evaluate the concepts.

Therefore, a strong BI approach assigns tools to help you comprehend how and when to use it to reach your intended result and provide insights on how to handle anything. Additionally, the BI should ensure that decision-makers, executives, and stakeholders may access the insights in addition to business users and analysts. It takes processes, technology, measurements, and governance structures to turn an idea into action.

To get the most out of your insights, your BI strategy should allow users to benefit from the extensive platform that offers insights. For accomplishing the goals and enhancing decision-making, the platform should be able to assist in strategic planning rather than execution.

Neglecting Key Data Sources

Most business users frequently limit their attention to the data found in data warehouses, databases, ERP, and CRM. Other data sources, like mobile, web monitoring data, and social media, contain essential information that may be significant to the organization.

Today, more than 90% of data is unstructured, comes from various sources, and might be in various formats. Occasionally, a company could miss out on customer insights who might have chosen to express their opinions on Twitter or Facebook. Others want location data enhancers, which can be used to display regional market trends and service consumption. Businesses only use one-third of unstructured data when making decisions. Businesses must use all available data, whether organized or unstructured, and make it accessible for analysis.

Neglect and Disregard Data Preparation

Insufficient data may contribute to poor judgments made by a business. Even if you have appealing insights, using terrible data in embedded analytics in business processes will surely result in disaster. Even if your data is awful, you will still experience issues. Because of the faulty data, your users will have trouble making decisions, and the BI team will spend hours cleansing the data rather than working in the end-user environment.

You can use master data management or data quality management to identify and fix inaccurate data before it reaches end users.

Data optimization for analysis requires using capabilities like cleansing, matching, and profiling to assure correctness and consistency. Self-service data preparation skills are essential because they guarantee that data is analytically ready while relieving IT of managing data assets. Before delivery, you should ensure that your technologies are equipped with functions that enable effective information aggregation and standardization.

Organization Culture

It may have a big impact on how long implementation takes. Implementation will take longer if an organization focuses on individual capability, decision-making, and problem-solving. Many employees fear that implementing BI methods will result in job restructuring, but the tool will help with strategic decision-making by giving studied data.

Wrapping Up

Some of the behaviors mentioned here seem like common sense but are more common than you might think. But now that you know the worst habits, you can avoid them and grow your company. Quaeris implements the best practices for integrating self-service BI tools. Companies are better positioned to foster a data-driven culture through self-service BI software.