The world of business is growing at such a rate we're increasingly needing more analysis and understanding of business performance and strategy.
By working to understand your key requirements, you can support pro-active management and business growth, helping you identify trends and opportunities, and empowering fast and accurate decision making across your business.
Getting started is key, and not always as daunting as it may seem. Once up and running the benefits are soon available and much of the learning can be transferred across other areas.
Often the mistake is to focus on the wrong question or chucking out a mass of number based reports. The key is to start small and answer the critical questions your business needs. Build out robust processes and consistent data definitions as these can then be transferred as solutions grow. Also ensure your team are all involved and engaged in the process, bringing up their skills to create data driven decision makers in all business areas.
As a business your goals will typically be a mix of financial and non-financial metrics, and this should be your start point not data or a specific analytics software.
Some key initial steps:
Every business has strategic goals, and data. Aligning the two creates a real time synergy that enables rapid decision making and means when you review your operational day to day reports you can see how they are influencing your overall business goals.