PowerHouse Fundamentals: How to Start Your Business Intelligence Program Series - Part II: Developing Your Business Intelligence Strategy and Aligning Stakeholder Objectives.
What is Business Intelligence Strategy?
A Business Intelligence Strategy is a roadmap that enables businesses to measure their performance and seek out competitive advantages and truly "listen to their customers" using data mining and statistics.
In my humble opinion, developing and documenting your business intelligence strategy along with aligning stakeholder goals and objectives with that strategy is absolutely the most important step in starting your business intelligence program. During the strategy development and stakeholder alignment stage you should note the following:
- Define your Vision and Goal. This is when you establish the vision and goal of the business intelligence program. Your vision should be aspirational, but concise enough such that it can be converted into an actionable plan. Your goals should be measurable and achievable.
- I believe business intelligence is a revenue generator, not a cost center. However, this requires proper strategy development and alignment with teams responsible for driving business growth.
- It is important that business intelligence strategy and tactics are shared and embraced by all levels of team members, not just the executive team. Documenting the strategy provides an opportunity for all team members to discuss, embrace and integrate that strategy into their everyday responsibilities as well as the role they’ll play in the business intelligence program.
- Aligning the business intelligence program’s actions with a defined goal and strategy will result in a much more focused and efficient effort from your team. As opposed to a team being being pulled in many different directions due to lack of focus, your team is hyper-focused on the actions required to realize the desired result.
- Set Expectations. There are many moving pieces that will require alignment as your develop your business intelligence program. These things require time, some financial investment (though in later articles we’ll discuss how to invest effectively), perhaps some updates to your infrastructure, an evolved mindstate in how you access and manage your data and patience in bringing it all together. These things are to be expected, but the expectations should be set ahead of time.
Summary
This initial step is used primarily to define a vision and goal, document strategy and tactics, create a measurement plan and obtain alignment across the stakeholders who will help bring the business intelligence vision to fruition. This step is absolutely critical and will help create a strong foundation for what we're discussing next: Defining the Scope of the Program and Measurement Planning.
About PowerHouse
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