Maximize Your ROI Using Agile Business Intelligence
Introduction
One of the reasons business leaders struggle to run their operations smoothly and effectively is the lack of proper observation. They don’t examine their daily operations report, so they can’t identify activities that are highly exposed to risks, spot new business opportunities, identify areas in need of improvement, or make accurate business decisions. With agile business intelligence, business leaders have a true picture of their company’s projects and performance in real time. It provides insight into the business’s current standing, allowing leaders to determine what needs to be done to achieve and exceed business goals. With this knowledge, leaders can strategize from a stronger foundation, allowing their business to grow faster and improve operational performance in the future. This blog explores agile BI and its benefits across the following subtopics:
- What agile business intelligence is.
- Benefits of agile business intelligence.
- Agile BI methodology.
- Six key factors for successful agile BI.
- Agile BI with Bold BI.
What agile business intelligence is
Agile business intelligence is the application of agile development methodologies to a company’s business intelligence initiatives. Its purpose is to allow a company greater flexibility in its BI strategy so that it can adapt quickly to new business demands and market trends to make better business decisions.
Benefits of agile business intelligence
Agile business intelligence is the result of wanting business intelligence strategies and solutions to deliver value to the company faster. The faster it can deliver value, the sooner the business will see a return on its investments into business intelligence. Agile BI can provide the following advantages to your business.
Increases engagement
Agile BI helps engage your stakeholders in the company’s business intelligence efforts. They are given the chance to provide direct input into the data sets and accompanying analysis that they would like to see. This allows the IT team and data analysts to develop new tools and dashboards that are relevant to business interests, rather than casting a broad net for all data and hoping to find critical information. The short feedback loop that agile BI follows allows stakeholders to quickly assess whether the analysis they’re receiving serves as a strong foundation for business decisions. If the information is not serving its expected purpose, they can suggest new data analytics to the IT team and receive that information much more quickly than in a traditional BI setup.
Motivates employees
Since one of the pillars of agile BI is adaptation, employees are not locked-in to stale data analysis that is incapable of changing with business requirements. Traditional BI moves slowly, requiring changes to be approved up and down the organization before being implemented. With the iterative approach of agile BI, employees are empowered to take charge of their data stories. They can choose a set of analytics to pursue and tweak it as needed during the development process as new considerations come into play. Data products are not set in stone. When employees are given greater authority over their work, they are more invested in the outcome, and will strive to achieve business goals.
Improves future performance
Agile business intelligence helps you improve your company’s performance through insights gained from your analytics. What’s unique about these analytics and insights is that they are derived more quickly than from traditional BI solutions because they are produced following agile methods. This brings adaptability and speed to BI. With agile BI, data analysis is consistently delivered, applied, assessed, and changed as needed to fit the business’s needs as they change over time. As a result, the analytics are always relevant to the business, ensuring better performance now and into the future. Furthermore, the business sees a return on its investments in business intelligence much sooner.
Speeds up decision-making processes
Agile BI helps users make quicker, smarter decisions in their departments. This is because the analysis needed to make difficult choices is delivered more quickly and can be reformulated regularly than in traditional BI processes. If a set of analytics is not uncovering useful trends or other information, the evaluation stage built into the agile process allows teams to identify what worked and what didn’t in the latest set. From there, a modified or entirely new set of analytics can be defined and delivered. This cycle happens at regular intervals, allowing teams to make informed decisions quickly. They aren’t left relying on intuition or outdated information.
Identifies areas for improvement faster
When part of a business operates inefficiently, it may take a long time for the inefficiency to be noticed, either through analysis or through a sudden unfortunate consequence. By following agile processes in your business intelligence strategy, analytics that focus on the business’s productivity, outputs, cash flow, and other internal operational essentials can be more quickly produced. This helps leaders identify problematic areas or just areas that could benefit from improvements, faster.
Agile BI methodology
Adopting agile BI processes can be broken down into five stages:
- Concept
- Inception
- Construction and iteration
- Transition
- Production
Let’s look into them in detail.
Concept
After deciding to transform a company’s business intelligence process into an agile one, the company data analysts outline the necessary changes that need to be made to the existing BI setup.
Inception
Data analysts collaborate with stakeholders to determine what data and analytics are needed to pursue business objectives.
Construction and iteration
Developers follow an iterative work process to deliver solutions that match stakeholder expectations. This process involves repeating a cycle of planning, building, and reviewing to remove unnecessary project elements in order to achieve continual improvement in the BI projects.
Transition
The projects and products developed in the previous stage are finalized and prepared for production along with any documentation, testing, and training.
Production
The analytics are put into production. In this stage, you need to keep an eye on the overall system, tracking successes, bugs, unforeseen problems, and areas for improvement. These inform the construction and iteration stage and work their way through to production.
Six key factors for successful agile BI
Successful agile business intelligence depends on the following factors:
- Active stakeholders
Active stakeholders provide BI requirements based on the company’s real-time data, aligning produced analytics with business goals.
2. Automation
Automation provides predictable and repeatable processes for managing and deploying BI configurations. It also helps speed up completion times by allowing development teams and testers to focus on issues that add value to the agile BI system rather than the particulars of a deployment.
3. Collaboration
Collaboration drives agile business intelligence processes. Project managers, product owners, technical experts, delivery teams, data analysts, IT teams, and stakeholders all work together to deliver business intelligence that is accurate, reliable, and actionable.
4. Well-trained personnel
Training employees equips them with the skills required to complete BI projects. This allows all of your staff, not just the data team, to complete tasks in their sprint boards within the defined timeline.
5. Evaluating KPIs
Evaluating KPIs helps you effectively assess progress, performance, and improvements in agile BI. This gives BI projects better chances for success by making it easy to detect issues at an early stage and resolve them before they cause any damage.
6. Choose the right BI software
Choosing the best BI tool means selecting BI software that allows you to easily publish reports, collaborates with other colleagues, use basic and advanced features, and quickly iterate. The right BI tool speeds up analytic development and deployment, delivering the value and benefits of BI faster.
Agile BI with Bold BI
Bold BI is a powerful business intelligence tool that is designed for creating and sharing interactive analytical dashboards. It is customizable and extensible to meet the specific needs of your applications. It also supports mobile apps, multiple development languages, theming, event handling, and authentication protocols.
Using Bold BI allows you to access your agile BI projects’ data across hundreds of data sources and visualize it in a wide range of widgets such as column charts, bar charts, pie charts, doughnut charts, tree map charts, and more. It also provides time-series support that can help you recognize seasonal changes in data, allowing you to forecast trends that affect business growth.
Bold BI includes collaborative features that let your whole team look at dashboards and metrics and discuss them via comments and replies. To learn more about how Bold BI can assist your agile-following teams, check out our agile dashboard examples.
Bold BI provides important features relevant to agile business intelligence. These supply users with the right tools to analyze the large volumes of data flowing through their company daily. Check out this link for more details.
You can check out this blog to learn more about effectively tracking and completing projects on time with agile business practices.
Conclusion
I hope now you have a better understanding of agile business intelligence and how it can help you improve your decision-making processes to achieve your business goals.
Try Bold BI now by signing up for a free 15-day trial to create interactive business intelligence dashboards that present your company’s data. If you have any questions, you can contact us by submitting questions through the Bold BI website, or if you already have an account, you can log in to submit your question.
Originally published at https://www.boldbi.com on February 16, 2023.
