Business intelligence is a hot topic in the information technology sector right now, and for good reasons. We live in the digital age. As a result, many business models built around the previous industrial revolution – models baked into business schools and entrepreneurship circles – have become outdated. But why is this?
With the digitization of information, money no longer became the only currency worth accumulating. While businesses ultimately have costs they need to pay and business plans they need to abide by to turn a profit, money is still the end goal – but the road to it has changed.
Any marketing team will tell you that the second most valuable currency on the market is attention. Holding a potential consumer’s attention is almost as good as having them pull out their wallet and spend money on your product or service because attention is what drives ad revenue, platform analytics, and search engine algorithms.
But that’s very much an external currency. Business intelligence is much more concerned with the single most valuable form of digital currency in the internet age: data.
The ability to obtain, organize, and interpret data is the foundation of sustainable growth for the modern brand. Businesses that invest properly in data analytics software and expertise have a leg up on the competition, but it isn’t enough to want good data.
You have to create a good BI project to make the most of it.
Unfortunately, many of the companies who want to do this end up running into some rather common mistakes that kill the momentum of their BI projects. Let’s look at some of these pitfalls and how best to avoid them.
Top 3 Mistakes That Are Killing Your Business Intelligence Project
1. Poor data filtration systems (i.e., bad data)
The first and most common mistake companies make with business intelligence is collecting bad data. A dataset that isn’t focused will inevitably skew any analytical information gathered from it. In essence, this means that however sophisticated or well-honed the analytics section of a BI project is, it will all be wasted on spoiled data.
Implementing strong data filtration systems to ensure that the information coming through the door is aligned with what the project needs are the first step to correcting this error. You can do this with authorization tools that filter out data from bots or other spam parties, preset parameters that exclude data that falls outside a targeted period, or any other pre-check that filters data before it gets to the analytics phase.
Business intelligence is often the most boring part because it’s the furthest away from actual outcomes, but it is perhaps the most essential to a good analytics plan. You can wring some results from mediocre business intelligence software and strategy, but even the best tools can only mislead you if you have a tainted data set.
2. Unclear goals for your business intelligence tools
Having recognized the importance of strong data filtration and scrutiny, business intelligence managers should not neglect how this fits into one of the other common mistakes their counterparts tend to fall into – poorly defined project goals.
The dashboards and visualizations are necessary. More than that, they’re fun, but the biggest mistakes in BI come down to the bread and butter basics which, if neglected, negate everything else.
A strong business intelligence project will have a clearly defined set of goals in two areas:
Information Outcome
Knowing what question you want the data to answer is the only way a good manager will know how to collect the information that will lend itself to an answer. Whether it’s to understand consumer behavior or track down wastage in the internal company workflow, a strong question is at the heart of an analytics project.
Target Audience
One of the first goals of a BI project is to define the audience or systems from which it needs to collect data. It’s not just enough to know who, though. When this data was created is also important. If it’s collected too early, it might disrupt any useful information gathered from recent trends or shifts in the audience or systems.
3. Not making your business intelligence project scalable
The third of our big mistakes is not immediately visible. It doesn’t seem like a problem until it is one, which is why we made sure to include it.
It shouldn’t just build a good BI project to handle the data set and processes available now, and it should be built with the future in mind. As businesses grow, they will inevitably collect more data. The goals and definitions around this data will expand, and the processes needed to analyze it will become more complex.
Making a business intelligence project scalable not only helps solve the problems of today, but it safeguards against unforeseen expenses when newer, bigger problems present themselves in the future.
How DashboardFox Can Help
Sure, it can be disappointing that we commit mistakes that hamper your business intelligence game. Of course, no one wants that to happen because business intelligence is not something you can order off eBay. It entails a lot of money, a lot of time, and effort, so you must know how to dodge these mistakes and keep your business intelligence solutions up and running.
But what if you have zero knowledge of how business intelligence works? Would that be an uphill battle for you? Nope, because we’re here to help.
DashboardFox knows that many businesses often encounter any of these mistakes, with some hitting the triple whammy and having all three in their system. With DashboardFox’s simple yet sufficient system, everyone can use it freely to generate helpful and interactive dashboards and even maps that can benefit your internal team (and your external customers and partners).
Not only that, it is so easy to use that even those without any proficiency in any computer or programming language can use it freely. DashboardFox understands that not everyone has a computer programming background, but that doesn’t mean that they have no right to use business intelligence tools for their businesses.
DashboardFox is also self-hosted, which safeguards your important data. Its affordable pricing (with its rare no subscription scheme) gives you more than enough reasons to use it for your business.
A business intelligence tool that is safe to use, user-friendly, extremely helpful in data visualization, and only asks you to pay once? With DashboardFox, it is now a reality.
Reach Out to Us
We don’t want to turn this article into a sales pitch, so let DashboardFox show you what you can get from them through actions. Feel free to reach out to us to set a meeting, or even better, book a free live demo with us. Grab this opportunity of a lifetime, and let’s talk business intelligence.