What Business Intelligence is missing

BI needs to start owning its purpose: decision-making

Word is on the street that data is important.
You sure have heard things like “Data is the new oil” and other buzz. But despite all the hype, most will agree:

Data is fundamentally changing the way we work.

But is it really?
Sure, we track everything trackable and the amount of data available to businesses is ever increasing. In theory, we’ve never before had the chance to base so many business decisions on data.

But the truth is, we struggle to actually make use of it and extract real value from the available data. A study found that 74% of businesses say they want to be data-driven but only a shocking 29% claim they are good at connecting analytics to action.

So why is that?

Let’s look at how the typical business intelligence process looks like today:
You take your raw data, pipe it through an ETL process to make it usable and then you build reports & dashboards and maybe have the data in some kind of self-service tool. Reports get emailed out and people can access the data on-demand. Perfect, right?

The process is missing the most critical part.

Well, there’s nothing wrong about those steps in particular — but nothing in this process says “data-driven decision making” whatsoever!

The part that levers all the technical mumbo jumbo and analyst work happening before, is missing. It’s the part that actually creates value from analytics by allowing you to make smarter, better informed decisions.

Well, data-drivenness - that is a cultural thing you might say. And while that is true for sure, you also need to have the right tools in place to support and enforce that data-driven culture und embed it deep into your process.

If you’re not able to quickly find the right insights within all your reports, if you’re not able to gather your team around an insight and make decisions from it, then your BI investments and all the effort is basically worthless.

Today, there is no system to take analytics, turn it into insights and derive meaningful decisions from it.

If you think about it, it’s crazy: Businesses spend billions on data infrastructure, analytics tools and BI headcount but the whole process that happens after you created your reports and fancy data visualisations — the step where the magic happens, where insights inspire action — is completely undefined.

Today, it’s up to the individual user alone what to make out of the information — if he receives it. There is no guidance, no framework, no track of record. Nothing that tells a user: “Check this out, this could be important.” Nothing that helps you discuss an insight, it’s impact and resulting steps to take.

And there is no place to keep track of all the events, communication and resulting action around data insights that would create accountability and build knowledge within the organisation.

When it comes to business reporting, people look at it or they don’t.

You don’t really know, you have no way of making sure people find it, read it and understand it.

For critical trends or changes in metrics, you rely upon someone manually monitoring the data day in day out and noticing early enough.
And even if changes get noticed and receive the necessary attention, this communication usually gets buried in email threads.
And even if some business decision is resulting out of it, there is no way everyone will remember the incident in a few weeks or months and learn from it.
And even if some people in your organisation act truly data-driven, you probably won’t know.

In short, there’s no visibility whether people are getting the right data at the right time and whether insights from that data result in business decisions or not.

The problem is that the process is mostly undefined and unsupported by today’s BI tools.

As a result, you can’t tell if your whole data initiative is effective or not. And if you can’t tell that, you’re likely not truly data-driven.

OK, so how can we fix this?

Becoming more data-driven doesn’t happen overnight — it’s a cultural and behavioural change that affects the whole organisation. But that doesn’t mean you can’t get started right now.
We’ll dive into that in our next post: 5 Steps to becoming a more data-driven organisation.

I would love to hear your thoughts and ideas about this topic. Leave a comment or shoot me an email at julian@pushmetrics.io.

About the author: I’m the founder & CEO of PushMetrics — we build software to help organisations make better decisions from their data. Go, check our website.