Business Intelligence (BI) – from data to business value

What is Business Intelligence - BI?

Many companies are collecting more data than ever but lack a clear path from numbers to decisions. Business Intelligence (BI) helps you structure, visualize, and use data where it is most useful: in everyday priorities, meetings, and decisions.

With BI, you can transform data into insights that drive action. Using technology, you can collect data from, for example, business systems, CRM, production, and customer interactions and obtain a common situational picture. The result is quicker decisions, reduced costs, and a better customer experience – backed by facts instead of gut feeling.

How to make measurability the engine of your BI work

Measuring absolutely everything rarely leads to real impact or business benefit. Instead, start with what influences your goals. Here’s how we would proceed:

• Link BI to business goals. Define 3-5 overarching goals related to, for example, growth, margin, NPS, or delivery precision and derive KPIs that can be operationally influenced.
• KPI tree and ownership. Break down your goals at the team level, assign owners for each KPI, and set triggers when actions are required.
• Data quality and governance. Determine definitions, data sources, update frequency, and quality controls.
• Data culture in everyday life. Make dashboards a part of your weekly meetings, educate your employees, and design visualizations for quick decisions.

5 ways organizations use BI

Let’s make it a bit more concrete. Here are five ways that BI can create value across the organization:

1. Sales forecasts and pipeline

Combine history, ongoing deals, and activity data for more accurate forecasts and prioritization of leads. The effect will be better capacity planning and higher hit rates.

2. Customer loyalty and churn

Track NPS, usage, and contact reasons to proactively capture at-risk customers and trigger retention efforts.

3. Operational efficiency

Monitor cycle times, bottlenecks, and delivery precision in real-time for shorter lead times, fewer errors, and reduced costs.

4. Financial transparency

Roll up data from various systems to get insights into revenues, margins, and cash flow per product or segment. This way, you can quickly identify deviations and make more precise decisions.

5. HR and skills

Visualize occupancy, absenteeism, and recruitment pipeline for better staffing and reduced overtime.

How to successfully implement BI effectively

Start with a sharp use case where the benefit is clear and data is available, for example, sales forecasting or delivery precision. Then build a minimum viable data platform with a simple data model that answers the use case questions. Design the solution for decision support by starting from what decisions need to be made and what signals are required – not from which visualizations look the best.

Automate flows and ensure quality with scheduled loads, validations, and a data catalog, and set alarms for delayed or deviant data. Finally, anchor the way of working by making dashboards a part of regular meeting forums, empowering each team to act on insights, and following up on the effects every month.

Common pitfalls – and how to avoid them

• Unclear goals and too many KPIs.
  Too many metrics and goals make it fragmented and unclear what actually drives value. Instead, prioritize 5–7 KPIs that link directly to business objectives.
• “Dashboard zoo”.
  Multiple overlapping dashboards without common definitions and governance make analysis and decisions ambiguous. Standardize your templates, definitions, and govern versions so all reports are based on the same concepts and history.
• Projects without data owners.
  Always designate owners for sources, definitions, and quality. Without clear accountability, data quality declines.
• Data before the question. 
  First formulate a decision or hypothesis, translate it into measurable KPIs, and then choose the data and tools needed to answer the question.

Start small – scale quickly

A defined pilot area builds trust and demonstrates business value. Then build further onto more processes and teams using the same data foundation, thus the benefits grow quickly without increased complexity.

Do you want to get more business value from your data? Nordlo helps with strategy, data platform, visualization, and anchoring in the business – from the first pilot to full-scale BI. Contact us, and we will tell you more.