5 steps to get in your best BI shape this new year

Finding a healthy balance in life is key to successful, happy living. It’s no different when we talk about business intelligence strategies. The beginning of the New Year is a great time to monitor, measure, review, and revise your BI implementation goals. Getting in shape takes time, but it’s easier to be successful if you break it down into manageable steps.

Follow these 5 steps to optimize and tighten up your BI operations for 2015:

1. Run an Analysis of Your Current BI Spending

You can’t manage what you can’t measure. Run an analysis of your current spending and usage of BI across your organization. What amount are you spending on BI, including licenses, the hardware, the IT staff building the system, the analysts using the system and building the reports, and the users creating the decks/visualizations. Find out who is using what and at what cost.

2. Assess How Your Company Uses Your BI System

Assess the way your company uses your BI system. What are the different roles and skillsets in your organization that use your BI system? Is it used for operational purposes? Is it used daily? Is it used at a strategic level? Is it used for forecasting? Be knowledgeable about how your company is using BI, and find where you are investing too much money, or too little.

3. Realize the Maturity of Your BI Deployment

How valuable is your BI system? When assessing the maturity of your BI deployment, it’s important to know objectively where you are currently, where you came from, and where you’re heading. In a maturity assessment you should be answering the following questions: How is your BI funded? How is it perceived in your organization? What other processes does it integrate with? Are you only using it to print out a list? Or are you systematically generating efficiency and creating cost-saving solutions? The more mature your company is, the more BI becomes a value/money-generating option, and not a cost center.

4. Take Measurable Steps to Increase Your Maturity Level

Once you find out your company’s maturity level from Step 3, plan to take measurable steps to bring your business up to the next highest maturity level. Do you need to change the way you fund your BI? Do you need to make improvements to your implementation plan? Do you need to be more synched across the organization? Select several categories and take the steps needed to improve. This will ultimately increase your ROI.

5. Unify Your BI Islands

Do you have different departments running different BI tools? Unify your BI islands. Get rid of undesirable and uncoordinated tools and replace it with a centralized self-serve solution that works across departments. By being sensitive to the needs of each department, you can satisfy everyone by both expanding the control of IT and yet still providing users with the flexibility they need to do their job using real-time data.

Pyramid Analytics Can Help Keep You Balanced

Organizations today face a challenging data dilemma: they are either highly governed with complex tools that are too IT-oriented, or they use smaller tools that attempt to be flexible and easy to use but do not scale. Most companies want one tool that has the ability to meet the dual demands of Enterprise IT and the business user.

Pyramid Analytics is uniquely positioned as a “governed data discovery” tool that covers both ends of the specutrum. Pyramid’s BI Office provides a well-balanced solution: on one end the data structure is governed and secure, and on the other end, the tool is flexible and easy to use, providing quick, intuitive ways to reputably build visualizations.

Pyramid Analytics’ enterprise customers have seen tangible progress in their BI environments after implementing BI Office. Under Pyramid Analytics’ leadership these organizations were able to increase their maturity level by systematically improving efficiency, performing sophisticated analysis, getting more users involved, and generating value-based decisions.

According to a 2015 BARC BI Survey, 90% of Pyramid Analytics’ customers would recommend their BI Office product to others. The report states, “Visual discovery tools need to be able to access large data sets to provide an accurate picture of trends impacting enterprises. Pyramid Analytics is the clear leader in this category, comfortably outpacing its nearest rival in terms of customer ratings.”

Pyramid Analytics is built for the Enterprise, but truly shines for the user.

Now is the time to tighten up the belt and start 2015 in your best BI shape. Pyramid Analytics can help.