Knowing what to do with all of the valuable data your business has collected can help you achieve your strategic goals efficiently and effectively. Organizations spend billions of dollars collecting data every year, making it more important than ever to leverage the wealth of information available. You need to ask the right questions about your data to turn it into insights and actionable steps to achieve your organizational goals.

How clear is our objective?

Business intelligence data can challenge assumptions about where your business currently stands that you may not have expected. This could look like a government agency striving for a citizen-centric approach, only to learn that the process for completing some transactions is longer than they realize, or an internal team thinking they’re in alignment with the organization’s strategic plan but with no clear path to achieve those goals. The right data can give you an objective perspective on where the business is going and identify opportunities to course-correct if necessary.

In addition to analyzing data to understand alignment with the overall strategic plan, you need to have clear, answerable questions that you want to answer about the business before collecting data. With the sheer amount of data available, it’s just as important to collect the right data as it is to ask the right questions about it in the data analysis phase. Establish clear objectives for collecting and analyzing data to make the most of the value it contains.

Where can we improve?

Conducting regular objective analyses of how your business is doing is vital because it helps you solve problems, prevent them from occurring, and make improvements. One helpful tool is the SWOT analysis, which examines the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. These analyses can be conducted on ongoing projects, completed projects, or organizational levels to gain awareness of how the business is performing against established benchmarks. Some questions might look like:

• What are we doing well?
• What is keeping us from meeting an objective, and what can we change to meet it?
• What is contributing to a high churn rate or website bounce rate?
• Do we need to change our marketing strategy?
• How do we compare against our competitors?

Asking questions about a problem your business has, like a high churn rate or failure to meet an objective, identifies data-driven ways to adjust. Analyzing data with specific, answerable questions helps you choose the best path forward to overcome or even avoid challenges.

What should we focus on in the future?

No one knows what the future will bring. A well-written strategic plan provides an outline for how the organization responds to challenges and new opportunities. Business intelligence data can inform the strategic planning process and can later answer questions about whether the business is aligned with that strategy, such as:

• Did our strategy meet our thresholds for success?
• What is most important to our customers in the near future?
• How will this change affect our future business?
• How are we responding to changes?

The ultimate goal of the business intelligence process is to make data-driven decisions, so you achieve your goals. Momentum works with businesses of all sizes across many industries and offers hands-on consultant support to understand your business and implement effective solutions. Get in touch with us today to get started with one of our business intelligence consultants.