Download a free guide on advancing from Stage 2 Descriptive Data Maturity
What is stage 2?
You’re in the early stages of embracing Business Intelligence (BI) technology, which has made generating insights easier than ever before.
BI tools are used to report on activity and drill-down into what has happened in particular areas of the business.
What started as one individual adopting BI may have cascaded into a small group of users – even spreading to other departments across the organisation. Nevertheless, at this stage, there are few technology standards in place and little to no collaboration between different departments. This means that data consistency may still be an issue that needs addressing.
What's the problem?
- No defined processes or standards in place, leading to inconsistent and soiled data
- Lack of data quality means that it’s difficult to get optimum results from the BI technologies in place
- Limited BI knowledge and skills across the business, so you may not be maximising your investment
- “Business silos” are still an issue that arise out of lack of coordination across the business
- Still manually manipulating data from multiple systems due to lack of data integration and preparation tools
Current situation: Lack BI of standards
Inconsistency is the main issue that needs to be solved at this stage. The lack of BI standards within your organisation can result in workplace “silos” can becoming even more apparent than ever.
What's next?
There are three boxes you must tick in order to progress:
Establish a BI tool and offer basic training – Your users are able to fully utilise the new technologies.
Step away from one off reports and instead build reports with meaning - This won’t fix the issue of data silos, but it will allow you to generate more insight to guide your business decisions.
Manipulate data outside of source systems to build more sophisticated reports – Taking more time with your data will uphold its quality and allow it to be put to better use, while combining data from different sources will enable you to gain richer insights.
The tools
So now you’re dabbling in Business Intelligence, let’s get you started in planning analytics to make the most of this insight – here are some of the tools you’ll need to get to the next stage.
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