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How Successful Companies Leverage BI for Executive-Level Reporting

How are successful companies using their business intelligence for smart decision-making? How do they leverage BI for executive-level reporting, and is reporting itself enough to make progress?

Faced with the pressing global competition, companies adopt various strategies to make more calculated decisions. Before, it was a common practice for organizations to put their entire focus on growth and risk reduction. But now in the era of digital transformation, it’s no more viable to disregard the existence of agile methodologies that can give valuable insight into the past, present and the future of the business.

Innovative business intelligence methods are what can help organizations reduce costs, monitor progress, remove human error, and most importantly, provide valuable insights that ease decision-making. By using business intelligence for executive-level reporting, organizations rely on analytics and real-time reports that can be shared among the company’s professionals at any time, providing facts that serve as the starting point for making an applicable decision.

The Growth of BI

The acceleration of business intelligence revolutionized businesses across the world. In January 2016, Technavio, a global technology research and advisory company, released the Global Business Intelligence Market 2016-2020 report, forecasting that the global BI market will reach a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 10% by 2020.

As Gartner predicts, by 2020 “only 50% of chief analytics officers (CAOs) will have successfully created a narrative to respond to rapid change and link financial objectives to BI&A initiatives and investments. Additionally, 40% of enterprises’ net-new investment will be in BI&A.”

A survey conducted by Robert Walters, the Business Intelligence 2016 Market Trend, shows that nearly 76% of teams frequently use BI as an input in decision-making, yet 6 in 10 employers struggled to find qualified BI professionals in the last 12 months.

The report shows that “the majority of teams are using BI to create daily dashboards that provide general information about a company, along with assisting in reporting and analysis.” But what’s interesting is that 40-45% of the surveyed will maintain Reporting and Analysis a priority in 2016, while 36% of the surveyed BI professionals responded that they were planning to utilize the flexibility of mobile BI for faster decision-making.

What are the ways companies leverage BI for executive-level reporting and is reporting itself enough to ensure progress?

As the president at Gartner, Cindi Howson told CIO, “There is a need for reporting, but reporting alone is not enough. If you’re only doing reporting you’re behind already. Unless your reporting is smart and agile, you’re behind. You’re a laggard.”

What It Takes to Go Beyond Traditional Reporting

Efficient executive-level reporting requires more than the implementation of a good BI technology. Incorporating a BI system into the organization is a process that requires attention from different parties, including executives themselves.

The question of data quality should also be addressed before taking other measures. Finding or building reliable software is just a follow-up to the data governance strategy that would guarantee that the BI system uses relevant data and thus produce complete and accurate reports. This crucial step is the foundation of advanced analytics and truly insightful reports.

Data Availability

Top-performing companies ensure efficiency by simply making BI reports available for important contributors. The reports are presented as strategic plans which include summaries with concise, explanatory headlines that show the purpose of the report and the connection between various sections. A report that provides actionable insights in a simple format allows executives to quickly find the data they need, open an informative discussion based on facts and possibly come to a conclusion or decide on further proceedings.

A great advantage of BI systems is data alerts connected to some thresholds and signaling positive, neutral or negative metrics. Executives stay up-to-date with real-time data alerts that are delivered after a certain action has been taken, which gives the organization space for reasoning and making a better decision. Data availability empowers teamwork. Multiple workers get to interact and make revisions based on the new data and adapt it to project requirements.

Data Accessibility

Easy data accessibility is the key to a higher level of executive reporting. Executives are constantly on the move and mobile allows the easiest real-time data distribution that can be accessed in any part of the world. Mobile BI is the key for success here because executives can reach out the reports at any time prior to making a decision. Using a BI dashboard or tool cuts down the time it would take for employees to engage in the traditional reporting process, saves time and money keeping employees productive at all times, and removes human error.

Helpful Visualization

With a BI system, the company’s team can forget about rows and columns of vague numerical data that needs to be ‘decoded’ before a decision is taken. Visually rich, easily accessible reports with logically organized data allow executives to see cues, identify past and current trends and compare them.

In the article Visualizations that Really Work, HBR explains how Anmol Garg, a data scientist at Tesla Motors, “has used visuals to tap into the vast amount of sensor data the company’s cars produce.”

The data scientist was exploring data to find insights that could be gleaned only through visuals. “We’re dealing with terabytes of data all the time,” he says. “You can’t find anything looking at spreadsheets and querying databases. It has to be visual.” For presentations to the executive team, Garg translates these exploration sessions into simpler charts discussed below. “Management loves seeing visualizations,” he says.

As the Harvard Business Review puts it, “decision making increasingly relies on data, which comes at us with such overwhelming velocity, and in such volume, that we can’t comprehend it without some layer of abstraction, such as a visual one.”

“Open-ended data-driven visualizations tend to be the province of data scientists and business intelligence analysts,” they continue. Improved Business Performance

With BI dashboards and tools, executives can easily carry out fact-based analysis of both current and past performance metrics of their organizations. The importance of data sourcing and analysis is translated into the organization’s ability to use it to their advantage. Without a stable BI system, an organization can be forced to spend their time, money, and efforts on collecting meaningful data with standard reporting tools, which takes a lot of time while data quickly expires.

According to Lisa Karf, a research director at Gartner, “many business intelligence and analytics leaders are unsure how to get started with advanced analytics, and many organizations feel they must make a significant investment in new tools and skills.”

To implement advanced analytics successfully, she recommends to change the organizational mindset and culture to obtain better tools and skills. If the company fails to make these changes, it might end up fatally.

What does the future hold for business intelligence? Can companies actually make a good use of their big data?

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Deborah Belford .