How can you get started with Business Intelligence (BI)?

One thing I've found helpful is conducting a thorough assessment of the organization's data needs and goals. Understanding what insights and metrics are crucial for decision-making will help define the scope and objectives of the BI initiative. Actually, I disagree with the approach of rushing into selecting BI tools without proper research and evaluation. It's essential to thoroughly assess different BI solutions to find the one that aligns with the organization's needs, scalability, and budget. An example I've seen is starting with a pilot project. By selecting a specific department or area within the organization to implement BI, it allows for testing and proof of concept before scaling up.

Unfortunately you cannot choose a tool on behalf of your organisation. You will be (in most cases) working with the tools purchased by your organisation. You can select to only specialise in one set of tools and then work on that tool basis. In reality this is what usually happens.

My 2 cents on how to better maintain/choose Data sources - 1. Evaluate Data Quality - lookout for clean data, and remove datapoints with that won't be useful. Inaccuracy in data can lead to bad BI strategies later. 2. Seamless Integration - it's never a harm to explore platforms that can utilize integration from multiple data sources. 3. Continuous Evaluation - Business needs change and so should your data source

You'll most likely use the tool what your company already has. But how do you pick the tool for the job? To answer that question, you need to think about your end goal. Do you want to analyze the data your self and present it to the end-users? Or Do your end-users need a tool that keeps track of the health of the business and gets periodic updates? You can't just select a tool randomly. Defined your goal and go from there.

After you have made some progress on creating your BI Solution, I recommend maintaining it as per the industry standard. - Run it through your performance/growth team to see how to leverage the Data. - Maintain some transparency with Stakeholder so even they view their growth. - Keep optimizing

Getting started with Business Intelligence (BI) is a management role that basically involves understanding business needs (as the title rightly describes). As a guide to begin a BI journey: 1. Identify the business goals and objectives; What does the business aim to achieve? What metrics and KPIs can be used to monitor and improve success? 2. Identify data sources; Consider both internal and external data sources that can solve the business problems. 3. Select BI tools; Good understanding of appropriate BI tools and data approach. What BI process to employ (ELT - Extract, Load and Transform data / ETL- Extract, Transform and Load data), depends on the destination system. 4. Implement BI solution. 5. Evaluate and monitor progress.