Business Intelligence for All

Nowadays, the companies are increasingly looking to achieve tangible business results using Business Intelligence, and the small to medium businesses can also benefit from this. CIO Insight published a slideshow, by Ericka Chickowski, with information for SMBs, based in a report developed by Aberdeen Group, that detailed a number of recommendations for SMBs to better leverage intelligence based on the BI maturity of the organization — Low, Medium, or High.

Low Maturity

- Define business unit key performance indicators and embed those into company strategy.
- With the right performance metrics, SMBs can better execute strategy and set themselves up for success.
- Stop depending on spreadsheets as the primary BI tool.
- Settling on spreadsheets as the only BI tool impedes productivity and obscures meaningful visibility into intelligence.
- Begin evaluating metadata management tools.
- SMBs that do BI right are six times more likely to use metadata management tools to ensure that one set of data definitions is used throughout all BI systems.

Medium Maturity

- Set up cross-functional teams to facilitate BI deployment.
- A multi-disciplinary team helps a business better understand the needs of the organization in order to deploy targeted BI more quickly and with less fuss.
- Architect usage monitoring into BI systems.
- Measure functionality usage to get a window into which BI elements offer the most ROI for their organizational needs.
- Invest in formal training.
- Training cultivates a BI culture and speeds up time-to-information and action by improving employee proficiency in BI systems across the board.

High Maturity

- Implement customer-facing dashboards.
- Views into things like customer account history, order history, new product releases or discounted products and services help bolster customer loyalty.
- Re-evaluate BI software licensing, deployment and service options.
- BI is trending toward capabilities that are open and standards-based, offering greater opportunities for better buying scenarios.
- Establish a BI "center of excellence."
- Mature SMBs can improve intelligence performance by establishing an independent BI center of excellence that looks for BI opportunities, communicates best practices and facilitates training across the organization.