Agility is critical in today’s fast-paced, constantly changing business climate. Leaders across the organization, from operations to marketing and sales to customer experience, need to be able to make quick decisions and pivot to adapt to new market and customer demands.
Data helps leaders make more informed decisions and is crucial in strategic planning and analysis. In addition, data helps tell a story and, more importantly, unlock innovative, new opportunities to drive company and consumer value.
Related Content: How to Gain Executive Buy-In with Data Storytelling
So, how can you find growth opportunities, extract value from your data at a pace equal to market demands, and maximize your data ROI? By adopting a future-looking approach to business intelligence.
Whether you’re a complex Fortune 100 organization, a mid-market company, or a startup, adopting an agile business intelligence approach will not only help you unlock value from data today — it’ll ensure you’re generating value one, five, and even ten years later as priorities and goals change over time.
Data Value Creation: Test and Reassess to Identify Growth Opportunities
In recent years the best approach to identifying potential value opportunities has been to take a design thinking or agile approach. Organizations focus on testing and learning. To start, organizations will develop a hypothesis based on the data and then test, iterate, and change course as needed. Reassessment is a vital part of the process. Plus, testing assumptions through data is an effective way to unlock value while potentially controlling expenses.
So how does one go about identifying these opportunities within data?
# Behavioral Analytics: Using Customer Data to Anticipate and Build for the Future
Customers and their data are one key opportunity many organizations can capitalize on to begin driving more value from their data.
The more companies understand their customers, the better they can serve and fulfill their needs. Organizations that can not only respond to customer needs — but also anticipate those needs — will remain on top.
Anticipating consumer needs requires a longer-term roadmap and a future-looking view. Looking at reactive feedback — information or data obtained in reaction to an action like a customer survey, chat conversations, or website traffic conversions, for example — is essential to building that long-term roadmap because it is centered around the future and what customers desire.
The data could help you answer some questions: What would help our consumers in the future? What is the evolution of our product or service? How can we help solve their problems within their day-to-day activities?
Related Content: Customer Experience: The Differentiator You Cannot Afford to Ignore
When combined with a comprehensive business intelligence strategy, leveraging data can help solve business challenges.
# How Agile BI Can Help Generate Greater Value from Your Data
Business intelligence experts' sole focus is to help extract insights and value from data and ensure you’re gathering the right data. They are critical advisors in collecting and obtaining the most pertinent data — such as the data suggested above — and then summarizing that information into understandable and actionable insights.
From PowerBI to Tableau, BI teams will utilize software to make data come to life through interactive dashboards. That information is then presented to stakeholders and will help drive business leaders with critical insights to propel the organization forward and deliver value.
A forward-thinking business intelligence expert can do much more than create a report or dashboard for stakeholders to extract insights from though. Business intelligence personnel work to continually review data as the company collects it and provide relevant recommendations for critical decision-making. This helps organizations continually drive value or ROI through revenue opportunities and cost optimization.
By applying Agile practices like rapid iteration, continuous improvement, and flexibility, business intelligence experts continuously work to enhance dashboards and KPIs. More importantly, they’ll build the dashboards with this long-term agile mindset; they won't just create for today but also with a future-forward view.
# The Benefits of Agile Business Intelligence
An agile business intelligence team is equipped with the skills and expertise to deploy dashboards adaptable to ever-evolving situations that will inevitably arise from changes in consumer demand to new stakeholder needs.
These teams create value through insights, which are only as good when they keep pace with rapidly changing market dynamics.
Agile business intelligence teams will develop visuals and dashboards, knowing that seismic shifts may occur after sprints, experiments, or shifting business needs. And they continue to deliver value by keeping the evolving landscape in mind and setting up dashboards that can be seamlessly adjusted with minimal modifications.
Ultimately, agile business intelligence allows organizations greater flexibility in their overall BI strategy, enabling better decision-making and the ability to respond quickly to changing business demands.
In addition to providing better flexibility and adaptability, agile BI also can:
- Deliver value quicker and provide stronger business intelligence ROI by adapting and aligning faster than traditional teams
- Speeds up and improves the decision-making process by providing relevant and timely data
- Builds the ability to identify and capitalize on areas of improvement faster for your business and customers
# A Case Study: Building a Future-Forward Dashboard with Predictive Analytics
Recently, business intelligence experts at Propeller supported a Fortune 500 global manufacturing company focusing narrowly on historical metrics and data. The client needed a centralized location to view and ingest the data and a dashboard for executive decision-making. Rather than simply delivering a historically based dashboard that would fulfill the organization’s current requirements, the Propeller team delivered a forward-looking dashboard.
Working closely with senior stakeholders, we identified what information would be necessary today — and in the near future. We then leveraged predictive analytics to build the KPIs into the dashboard for the future. These predictive analytics helped the team forecast and plan. Most importantly, the dashboard was developed with agility in mind so it could be easily updated and refined as business needs evolved.
# Conclusion
In the era of big data, there’s no lack of information being gathered. Organizations need to focus on why, how, and what to collect. Furthermore, organizations must combine their long-term strategic plans or initiatives with investment in BI resources to maximize their ROI from data. They can achieve this by leveraging an agile business intelligence operating model. In today’s chaotic business climate – a rigorous data process will give you a competitive edge.
