When I first started working my way through and up the proverbial "corporate ladder", more and more I found myself coming across terms such as "Business Intelligence" and "Analytics" being thrown around.
Anywhere from hallway conversations with my colleagues during coffee (or maybe, shhh... smoke breaks 😬 -- I had long since quit smoking though, fortunately), to internal weekly sales and operations meetings with different managers or senior leadership, and later at boardroom meetings with prospects and customers all over the country and world, I came across these words. What did they need? What were they missing? Why was I not getting it?
In most scenarios, I found two main synopses for the scenarios that invoked the use of such impressive-speak: either they had no idea why they needed or why they thought that they needed to understand the concept of said "business intelligence", but that they knew it was important for someone in their organization, for some reason.
Or perhaps, they very much did understand "The Why", but had no idea how or what they could implement to get them to a place where one day they will be able to cheerfully smirk, hands clenched, evil smile big ala Mr. Burns "excelllllent" - over their business's of their respective KPI's for operations, sales, marketing and so on.
After many years of trials and tribulations, working on building reports, working on trying to get "one version of the truth" for my customers and for myself with a plethora of products and integrations, and many long sleepless nights thinking about these concepts (ok, well maybe not really that dramatic to be frank, but you get the gist of the dramatized build-up here...) - I learned one simple thing: It's not that scary or complicated if you don't make it to be.
It all starts with recognizing, albeit sometimes that might be easier said than done, that when you are in a position of ownership, leadership, or even end-user or customer - that numbers and data make the world (our business world) go round - and it doesn't have to be a daunting or an expensive of a process to calmly signal TIME-OUT, take a short step back, and relook at the internal systems and reporting capabilities that comprise of maintaining your business's eternal pulse.
When we want to have "business intelligence" and the ability to automate and gather simple actionable data - we need to understand mainly two simple things - what do I have now, what don't I have now that I need to implement or tweak, and what do I actually need out of both buckets of "things"?
Schedule time with me today to learn how I approach this concept and how I have helped other clients of mine establish business intelligence capabilities that are simpler, easier, and more often than not more interesting and actionable!