Maximizing Your Business Intelligence ROI

Maximizing Your Return On Investment From Business Intelligence

1. Know Where The Benefits Lie.

Besides delivering Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) - driven historical analysis or predictive modeling based on neural-network algorithms, a BI solution can do much more to maximize the return on investment (ROI) of your BI and Data Warehousing by:

• generating reports with less drain on IT and staff time. Cutting down on the time and amount of staff required to create a report can be an easy way to illustrate how much money you will save with this solution.
• enabling executives to see and react to trends. Sales managers can be alerted to changes in demand across products, geographies, and even individual accounts.
• enabling managers to see and address inefficiencies. By using BI to analyze operational data, you can reveal longstanding patterns of waste and lost revenue.
• providing a means for setting standard and checking performance against those standards. Your company will maximize revenue and profits by setting and achieving sales and efficiency targets. Use your business intelligence solution to obtain valuable insight into historical performance data and establish reasonable goals for the company.
• delivering historically based predictions of the future. This is where the “data mining” comes in, where hidden patterns in customer data can be discovered to provide your salespeople with unexpected cross-selling opportunities to increase revenue per customer.

2. Organize your data warehouse.

Preparing your data for the BI project is an essential part of maximizing your ROI. Obviously, your BI solution won't solve anything or make you any money until it is given data to analyze, and usually the quality of the analysis depends on the quality and organization of your data.

Many times, your executives will want to leverage data from a number of sources within your organization, and even if your company's relevant data resides in a single repository, a thorough validation and “data cleaning” of your databases should occur, to make sure that no nasty surprises should occur. Make sure to factor in enough time and labor for this process to occur before the BI package is deployed at your company.

3. Use it or lose it.

Your company won’t realize the full potential of the new BI package unless a serious dedication is put into training your staff, and integrating new business processes that utilize the creation these BI reports. Without fully maximizing the breadth and repeatability of the new software, you won't be able to maximize the ROI of your BI project.

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