English 
Vietnamese Business intelligence (BI) is no longer a new concept today as it has been commonly used for the last 30 years. Business intelligence or Business Insights solution is known as a set of processes, analysis methods and tools to simplify the transforming and transferring process; henceforth, improve business performance as a whole. However, despite the rising need of business insights and its maturity, best practices only appeared in the last 5 years. Why?
Truth be told, legacy BI solution is too complicated, heavy for businesses to implement without having some remarkable impacts to their IT system, not to mention its high costs and low adaptability. But there are organisations that successfully maintain their competitive advantages by strategically aligning their BI solutions with other inner systems. Here are 5 ways that best in class organisations are adopting to keep their BI solutions work well.
Do it for yourself
Legacy BI solutions largely depend on the organisation’s IT systems. Normally, people are required to answer basic question regarding their data, then submit them in the form of requests to IT developers to deliver an answer. If any changes happen during the process, it will cause the whole system to restart to the beginning, which results in decreasing productivity and increasing lead-time. Organisations can improve this by enhancing self-service business by directing the requesters to answer their own questions. Furthermore, people such as stakeholders or executives should be able to create ad-hoc reports and analyse real-time data to support the decision-making process.
Beauty as a competence
Legacy BI systems only provide hard-to-use dashboards and analytics tools that require users to go through various training sessions to learn how to use them properly, which is time consuming and costly as a result. People like to use tools that are attractive and usable. They want something clean and clear and user friendly without spending too much time and effort to understand and handle it. Hence, organisations should look for or build up a BI solution that is interactive, beautiful and have easy-to-access analytics. The dashboards and reports have to be supported on mobile devices for users to access the information anywhere, anytime, and thus increase productivity.
Acknowledge the reality of data
Legacy BI system was built based on the idea of a fast, scalable data architecture that held only clean data. However, this ideal data architecture does not exist in any business because even if the data source that is perfect and complete, it is most likely obsolete. Therefore, organisations need the next generating BI tools that enable them to work with all types of data from multiple sources. This also means complying any new data sources with existing data governance practices in order to properly maintain and share data across the organisation.
Furthermore, by blending data from multiple sources such as sales data and operational data, business can increase the value and robustness of data. This will also enable different users to come up with their own analysis from one combined data source to deliver suitable information for their separated decision-making process.
Stay tuned to the next blog post which we are going to introduce the remaining 2 ways to improve your BI solutions, or you can discover them now in the full report “Going from reactive to proactive: what Business Intelligence means today”
