The 32 most important products of a BI team

Seven products to gain insight:

1. Lists & reports: these are, for example, standard reports or lists. Users can also create these ad hoc. For example, reports on turnaround times or lists of all courses attended by employees in a quarter.
2. Alerts: for example, generic alerts on many sick days or departures in a month. It can also be specific alerts about many calls to customer service within a short period of time.
3. Control queries: an organization can do nothing with a database that contains incorrect or poor-quality data. Through frequent check queries, you check that all database fields are filled correctly. In this way you organization can do nothing with a database that contains incorrect or poor-quality data. Through frequent check queries, you check that all database fields are filled correctly. In this way you can check if you have good-quality data. You do this by asking queries such as “select all orders that do not have a product attached to them” or “give me all customers whose zip code is not entered.
4. Ad-hoc query: request random information from the database. For example, consider all Amsterdam customers who purchased a particular product in a specific week.
5. Simple analyses: create analyses quickly with OLAP cubes or let end users do it themselves with self-service BI tools, such as Power BI from Microsoft. For example, drill-down analyses on sales or market share.
6. Dashboards: clear dashboards with KPIs. These show managers and employees at a glance whether the organization is still on track. Dashboard screens in many cases consist of gauges or traffic lights colored green, yellow and red, simple graphs and other visualizations. Sometimes notifications also appear on the screen.
7. Visual Data Discovery: Visual data discovery tools such as Tableau and Qlik allow end users to visualize their own data. This, too, is a form of self-service BI. At organizations that visualize analytics, those analytics are seen by nearly 50 percent more employees, research shows.

Seven services a BI team can provide:

8. Perform analyses on demand: for teams, employees and managers, the BI team performs analyses on the data in search of answers or greater insight.
9. Information analysis: for the first step of your BI project, deliver key information that users need to make smarter decisions.
10. Moderate data discovery sessions: show managers and employees what techniques and opportunities exist to extract value from your data through interactive visualization. See also DataDoing.
11. Data acquisition: by acquiring and collecting data from other sources (external or internal), you can generate more and newer insights.
12. Data management: improve data quality and maintain master data and metadata.
13. Authorization and information security: ensure that only authorized people can see the available information.
14. Incident management: in case of a disaster where the data warehouse or (part of) the BI platform goes down, it is important that users can quickly create reports and perform analyses again. For that to happen quickly, specific knowledge about the IT infrastructure is needed. The IT department can have that knowledge. Of course, it is also possible to equip someone within the BI team with these skills.

The five predictive analytics products

15. Data mining: automatically look for patterns and relationships in data sets. Apply data mining techniques to your customers’ purchasing behavior, for example. That way, you’ll discover which products they regularly buy together, and what are decisive factors in doing so.
16. Textmining and social analytics: extract hidden information from emails, reviews or documents. Or scan public social media channels for buyer or user opinions. That’s handy for the product development department.
17. Speech analytics: automatically analyze stored conversations or recordings of meetings. This allows you to determine sentiment or recognize patterns in the course of conversations.
18. Image processing: search image files for information and patterns. For example, finding people with a mustache in a bar or the dents in a car.
19. Personalized HTML or text: based on advanced analytics you can compose a personalized HTML code, and present that in the customer portal or on the supplier website.

Growth is not only possible by looking for new markets, it is also possible by making better use of existing markets. For example, by analyzing a customer so that the sales person is sure to offer the right product. Or increase profits by better planning of resources or more precise allocation of budgets.

Three products that a BI team uses to help employees:

25. Downloads and interfaces: offer files that are frequently requested by employees as downloads on the intranet. For example, a list of customers who provided the most sales or a file of returned devices from the past week.
26. Web services: use Web services to let business partners or internal systems request data from the data warehouse.
27. Big Data storage: Big Data analyses place different demands on storage systems, for example in the data lake.

Employees and managers are also helped by more knowledge. An essential part of an intelligent, data-driven organization is increasing the knowledge within your organization. That’s why a BI team also provides training to end users.

Two more services to support your organization:

31. Automatic distribution of information: distribute daily, weekly or monthly reports, analyses and dashboards to users in an automated and personalized way.
32. Monitoring and managing data quality: it has already been said, good quality data is essential for good analysis and overviews. By monitoring and managing data quality, the organization always has the right information.