Lesson 3 – Part 1
Business Intelligence
Solutions

What is Business Intelligence (BI)?
Business intelligence defined
Business intelligence (BI) refers to capabilities that enable organizations
to make better decisions, take informed actions, and implement more-
efficient business processes.
BI capabilities allow you to
 Collect up-to-date data from your organization
 Present the data in easy-to-understand formats (such as tables and
graphs)
 Deliver data in a timely fashion to the employees in your organization
BI keeps your organization in the know, and success depends in a large
part on knowing the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the market.
How popular are your products or services with consumers? What are your
competitors doing? Why are consumers choosing one brand over another?

How—and when—will the market change? What are the trends for the
future?
As documented by Gartner, BI solutions can help companies get answers
to those questions.
Business intelligence software
Search the internet, and you’ll find a variety of definitions for BI software.
In general, a BI solution is a combination of strategy and technology for
gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data from internal and external
sources, with the end result of providing information and analytics about
the past, present, and future state of the subject being examined.
The terms business intelligence and business analytics are often used
interchangeably. Business analytics, however, refers more specifically to
the process of examining data to find trends and insights. When used
together, “BI and business analytics” has a broader meaning and includes
every aspect of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data. For our
purposes, the terms will be the same.

Current BI/business analytics solutions offer applications to help you gain
actionable information at every stage of the process. This includes
applications for data preparation, analysis, data visualization, reporting,
and collaboration for use on premises, at the desktop, in the cloud, and
away from the office via mobile capability.
Business intelligence benefits
Data. It’s big. It’s getting bigger, and it’s growing exponentially. More and
more people produce it. Data is created by an increasing number of
things—commonly called devices. It’s becoming more varied and more
unstructured. About five years ago, someone said 90 percent of the world’s
data was generated by the previous two years. That’s astonishing.
Data and the ability to derive insights from that data is the most valuable
resource for sustaining and growing businesses.
Using a best-in-class approach to BI can help your organization gain a
competitive advantage by reducing the time and effort required to acquire,
integrate, distribute, review, and respond to new data.

The better organizations are at processing data, the more benefits they gain
from BI. Those data-processing leaders are exerting immense pressure on
all competitors who fail to recognize the potential in-time data. Late
adopters are forced to speed up their analytics ambitions to stay on par
with competitors and new market entrants.
BI represents the heart of every data-driven enterprise, which makes it the
epicenter of transformation. Increasing the impact of an organization and
making it more efficient are the ultimate goals of implementing a new BI
tool; however, with the right BI technology, you can derive several
additional benefits as well.
1.Improve data accuracy
2.Make better decisions more quickly
3.Improve mission-critical outcomes
4.Share data across business functional areas
5.Gain better visibility into financial and operational information
6.Identify and reduce inefficiencies

7.Eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse
8.Improve productivity and worker morale
9.Boost return on investment, while cutting total cost of ownership
10. Enhance transparency and service at all levels
How business intelligence solutions make the most of your data
BI solutions have the potential to be an essential tool for decision-making
and strategy development. The resulting information can be used
throughout a company, from marketing and sales to supply chain and
finance, for tasks such as
 Measuring marketing campaign results
 Gaining visibility into cash flow, gross margins, and operating expenses
 Capturing insights about employees and prospects to optimize HR
processes and recruitment
 Tracking parts and material trends and supplier performance

 Forecasting revenues and transactions
 Optimizing call center and depot staffing levels
 Obtaining cross-enterprise views
 Uncovering new revenue opportunities and patterns
BI can help everyone in your organization. But to do that, it needs to be a
special kind of solution.
The average enterprise solution requires an IT department to set up the
environment and, in many cases, connect the internal and external data
sources. Historically, IT was responsible for all BI, because these solutions
usually required specialized expertise such as an in-depth knowledge of
SQL or extensive scripting for data preparation.
What you should look for in a business intelligence solution
To make BI an effective solution for business units—or for anyone else
with a relatively low level of technical knowledge—the solution has to be

as user friendly and accessible as possible for all levels of employees
throughout an organization.
A single BI platform
Consider a solution that offers a single, integrated platform of applications.
Many organizations have a legacy business intelligence ecosystem
featuring multiple solutions for reporting, discovery, analysis, and other
functions. Working with all those solutions can be expensive and require
extensive technical knowledge. Multiple solutions can also create
compatibility issues.
A single-platform approach offers an end-to-end solution that includes
gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data, with everything working
together so there are no compatibility issues. With everything in one place,
there’s no need to go hunting for tools. You can centralize your data
models and metrics for a comprehensive representation of your business—
something that can be difficult to accomplish with a multiple-solution
ecosystem.

BI as a service (BIaaS)
A BI solution should be easy for users across your enterprise to access—
whether they are in the office, working remotely, or on the road. A cloud
solution offers the highest potential for accessibility and availability. It can
be accessed when and where it’s needed, for individual use or shared with
coworkers.
A cloud solution also can be easily scaled to fit an organization of almost
any size and is flexible enough to meet the demands of a growing business.
Connected BI
Most BI solutions have the capability to connect with one or more data
sources. Consider a solution that offers prebuilt connections. With this
type of solution, it’s easy to load and integrate data from diverse sources.
Prebuilt connections eliminate the time needed to make the connections
and reduce the complexity of the solution, enabling your IT people to focus
on other tasks.

Augmented analytics
You want a smart solution that can make BI easy—one with augmented
analytics employing embedded machine learning. This kind of solution
can help users in gathering, analyzing, interpreting, and conveying
information—simplifying and automating tasks.
Your solution should be able to automate data preparation and the
collection and consolidation of information from multiple sources,
accelerating the process and reducing the chance of errors. It should also
be able to augment your analysis by recommending new data sets to
include in the review for more accurate results.
You want a smart solution that lets you quickly and easily search for what
you need and get to the data directly—one that allows you ask questions
and receive answers in human language rather than code.
Some solutions even offer a semantic layer that allows users to access data
and modify requests and data set parameters via common business terms.

Users should also be able to easily access predictive analytics and
forecasting to see patterns and forecast future outcomes and trends—
without the need to know coding. A smart solution with embedded
machine learning can offer that advantage and more.
Data visualization
Many smart solutions come with data visualization, which provides the
capability to automatically transform data into pie charts, graphs, or other
types of visual presentation. Users can quickly and easily see and
understand patterns, relationships, and emerging trends that might go
unnoticed in a spreadsheet of raw numbers.
With data visualization, you can get new and unique insights by creating
rich data mashups. You also can craft stories about your business by using
high-impact visuals that require no specialized training to interpret.
With this kind of smart system, you can pull data from internal and
external sources. Then you can decide among numerous options which

graphic is best for presenting the data, or you can allow the application to
automatically make a recommendation based on data results.
Self-service business intelligence
To be a true business tool, a BI solution must be designed for
businesspeople to use on their own—a self-service solution.
Your BI solution should be easy to navigate with point-and-click or drag-
and-drop features. It should have some type of dashboard with intuitive,
interactive access to information and offer guided, step-by-step navigation
and built-in functionality so that customization is not required. It should
give users a choice of doing a task themselves or employing automation
to handle it.
Users also should have full control to load their data and analyze it from
any angle to uncover issues and new opportunities. They should be able to
mash up and blend internal and external data for deeper insights. When it
comes to sharing what they’ve learned, users should be able to create their
own reports.

They also should be able to discover the answers to their most pressing
business questions and communicate their findings to their peers and
management teams across the enterprise—without waiting for a response
from IT.
Mobile business intelligence
In today’s accelerated world, businesspeople need access to intelligence
around the clock, no matter where they are. So consider a BI solution with
mobile capabilities.
Mobile BI solutions are available with voice-enabled access and real-time
alerts. You can talk to your data via a search-driven approach. You can
view, analyze, and act on data in the cloud or on premises. You can create
mobile analytical apps with rich, interactive visualization without writing
a single line of code. You can build apps once and distribute anywhere—
all from your phone or tablet.
A solution that incorporates AI and machine learning can provide you with
a personalized assistant that understands what you need—when and where

you need it. For example, say you have a business meeting in New York.
The personalized assistant can determine what business report and
graphics are required for your business meeting. It can translate speech to
text and alert you when new data is available to analyze.
You won’t have stay tethered to your desk to analyze information. With a
mobile device and a cloud-based BI solution, your analytics can come to
you, wherever you are.

Key Performance
Indicators

4 Steps to Implement Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is vital to the
health and success of any modern business. That said, it is often
a struggle for many customers and organizations. Applying
KPIs is an essential piece of rigor to your forward-looking
roadmap but it isn’t always easy.
This problem is nearly universal in the strategic planning space. Whether I’m working with an emergent
business looking to mature its business processes or an established player looking to identify
the key indicators the same questions persist.
“How can we develop KPIs?”
“Which measures really are driving results?”
“Isn’t ALL of this data important?”
While the answers can vary by organization, the basics span industry, and organization maturation.
So, what are KPIs?

Before we dive into developing and applying KPIs, it’s important to understand the function they perform.
KPIs are much more than numbers that are reported on a recurring basis – or at least they should be.
KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. By their name, they enable you to understand the health of your
business so you can make critical adjustments in execution to achieve strategic goals.
A quick look at your smartphone yields a litany of fitness data. But what you do with that information is what
makes the difference. After all, “what gets measured, gets managed” and below we will discuss simple steps
to do just that.
Step 1: Develop your KPIs
Developing KPIs is the first step. To begin, review what data you are already collecting.
Most organizations feel like they need to reinvent a new measurement system. In most situations, the data
collection process is rarely the limiting factor.
For less sophisticated organizations, ask a simpler question “what data can you measure”. Even if you do not
have a CRM it is still possible to count the number of outgoing sales calls you made on a given
day/week/month.
When working through developing KPIs, your objective is to separate what are KEY Performance Indicators
vs just metrics.
Step 2: Identify what is important
As a next step, you need to understand what information is truly important. The first step here is to separate
operational measurements from strategic elements.

Operational metrics are often used in a ‘real time’ capacity to assess what is happening in your organization
on an hourly or daily basis.
Strategic KPIs take a longer view at monitoring progress towards a stated destination.
Consider your smartwatch. Climbing a few flights of stairs will cause your heart rate to climb. Climb a few
more and your watch may even notify you that you need to “take a break”. This is a good indicator of how
your body is performing in the here and now, but it tells you very little about your overall cardiovascular
health.
We use different metrics like blood pressure and resting heart rate to evaluate your health over the long term.
And your fitness goals likely align with these metrics. These are your KPIs.
Measuring Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is vital to the health and success of any modern business. That
said, it is often a struggle for many customers and organizations. Applying KPIs is an essential piece of rigor
to your forward-looking roadmap but it isn’t always easy.
This problem is nearly universal in the strategic planning space. Whether I’m working with an emergent
business looking to mature its business processes or an established player looking to identify
the key indicators the same questions persist.
“How can we develop KPIs?”
“Which measures really are driving results?”
“Isn’t ALL of this data important?”
While the answers can vary by organization, the basics span industry, and organization maturation.

So, what are KPIs?
Before we dive into developing and applying KPIs, it’s important to understand the function they perform.
KPIs are much more than numbers that are reported on a recurring basis – or at least they should be.
KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. By their name, they enable you to understand the health of your
business so you can make critical adjustments in execution to achieve strategic goals.
A quick look at your smartphone yields a litany of fitness data. But what you do with that information is what
makes the difference. After all, “what gets measured, gets managed” and below we will discuss simple steps
to do just that.
Step 1: Develop your KPIs
Developing KPIs is the first step. To begin, review what data you are already collecting.
Most organizations feel like they need to reinvent a new measurement system. In most situations, the data
collection process is rarely the limiting factor.
For less sophisticated organizations, ask a simpler question “what data can you measure”. Even if you do not
have a CRM it is still possible to count the number of outgoing sales calls you made on a given
day/week/month.
When working through developing KPIs, your objective is to separate what are KEY Performance Indicators
vs just metrics.
Step 2: Identify what is important
As a next step, you need to understand what information is truly important. The first step here is to separate
operational measurements from strategic elements.

Operational metrics are often used in a ‘real time’ capacity to assess what is happening in your organization
on an hourly or daily basis.
Strategic KPIs take a longer view at monitoring progress towards a stated destination.
Consider your smartwatch. Climbing a few flights of stairs will cause your heart rate to climb. Climb a few
more and your watch may even notify you that you need to “take a break”. This is a good indicator of how
your body is performing in the here and now, but it tells you very little about your overall cardiovascular
health.
We use different metrics like blood pressure and resting heart rate to evaluate your health over the long term.
And your fitness goals likely align with these metrics. These are your KPIs.
Step 3: Analyze your KPIs over time
KPIs are only useful if we analyze and derive trends from them. Many organizations stop at merely “tracking”
metrics. This is only where the work begins. The data tells a story, and it is your job to interpret the
information to make critical decisions.
When analyzing over time, determine what periods of time enable different insights for your organization. If
you are managing sales KPIs, but your sales cycle is 9 months long, a quarterly view likely isn’t enough to
spot trends. Use a combination of leading and lagging indicators to balance short-term and long-term
insights.
Rushing decisions on data trends can lead to incomplete data and incorrect decisions.
Step 4: Connect actions with results

If you have successfully analyzed your data, now it’s time to take the next step and connect your tactics with
KPIs.
You know how the data is changing over time, but do you know what drives the change?
By aligning activities with results, you not only measure the health of your organization, but you can predict
what steps drive the right outcomes. Furthermore, you can identify which activities you undertake “because
we’ve always done it this way”. These activities are not driving outcomes and should be eliminated ASAP.
The combination of understanding what impacts results while reducing inefficiency can take your
organization to the next level.

Balance Scorecard
Application

What Is a Balanced Scorecard (BSC),
How Is It Used in Business?
What Is a Balanced Scorecard (BSC)?
The term balanced scorecard (BSC) refers to a strategic
management performance metric used to identify and improve various internal
business functions and their resulting external outcomes. Used to measure and
provide feedback to organizations, balanced scorecards are common among
companies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Europe. Data
collection is crucial to providing quantitative results as managers and executives
gather and interpret the information. Company personnel can use this information
to make better decisions for the future of their organizations.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
 A balanced scorecard is a performance metric used to identify, improve, and
control a business's various functions and resulting outcomes.
 The concept of BSCs was first introduced in 1992 by David Norton and Robert
Kaplan, who took previous metric performance measures and adapted them
to include nonfinancial information.

 BSCs were originally developed for for-profit companies but were later
adapted for use by nonprofits and government agencies.
 The balanced scorecard involves measuring four main aspects of a business:
Learning and growth, business processes, customers, and finance.
 BSCs allow companies to pool information in a single report, to provide
information into service and quality in addition to financial performance, and
to help improve efficiencies.
Understanding Balanced Scorecards (BSCs)
Accounting academic Dr. Robert Kaplan and business executive and theorist Dr.
David Norton first introduced the balanced scorecard. The Harvard Business
Review first published it in the 1992 article "The Balanced Scorecard—Measures
That Drive Performance." Both Kaplan and Norton worked on a year-long project
involving 12 top-performing companies. Their study took previous performance
measures and adapted them to include nonfinancial information.
BSCs were originally meant for for-profit companies but were later adapted
for nonprofit organizations and government agencies. It is meant to measure
the intellectual capital of a company, such as training, skills, knowledge, and any
other proprietary information that gives it a competitive advantage in the market.
The balanced scorecard model reinforces good behavior in an organization by

isolating four separate areas that need to be analyzed. These four areas, also
called legs, involve:
 Learning and growth
 Business processes
 Customers
 Finance
The scorecard can provide information about the firm as a whole when viewing
company objectives. An organization may use the balanced scorecard model to
implement strategy mapping to see where value is added within an organization.
A company may also use a BSC to develop strategic initiatives and strategic
objectives. This can be done by assigning tasks and projects to different areas of
the company in order to boost financial and operational efficiencies, thus
improving the company's bottom line.
Characteristics of the Balanced Scorecard Model (BSC)
Information is collected and analyzed from four aspects of a business:
1. Learning and growth are analyzed through the investigation of training and
knowledge resources. This first leg handles how well information is captured

and how effectively employees use that information to convert it to
a competitive advantage within the industry.
2. Business processes are evaluated by investigating how well products are
manufactured. Operational management is analyzed to track any gaps,
delays, bottlenecks, shortages, or waste.
3. Customer perspectives are collected to gauge customer satisfaction with
the quality, price, and availability of products or services. Customers provide
feedback about their satisfaction with current products.
4. Financial data, such as sales, expenditures, and income are used to
understand financial performance. These financial metrics may include dollar
amounts, financial ratios, budget variances, or income targets.
These four legs encompass the vision and strategy of an organization and require
active management to analyze the data collected.
Benefits of a Balanced Scorecard (BSC)
There are many benefits to using a balanced scorecard. For instance, the BSC
allows businesses to pool together information and data into a single report rather
than having to deal with multiple tools. This allows management to save time,
money, and resources when they need to execute reviews to improve procedures
and operations.

Scorecards provide management with valuable insight into their firm's service and
quality in addition to its financial track record. By measuring all of these metrics,
executives are able to train employees and other stakeholders and provide them
with guidance and support. This allows them to communicate their goals and
priorities in order to meet their future goals.
Another key benefit of BSCs is how it helps companies reduce their reliance on
inefficiencies in their processes. This is referred to as sub optimization. This often
results in reduced productivity or output, which can lead to higher costs,
lower revenue, and a breakdown in company brand names and their reputations.1
Examples of a Balanced Scorecard (BSC)
Corporations can use their own, internal versions of BSCs, For example, banks
often contact customers and conduct surveys to gauge how well they do in
their customer service. These surveys include rating recent banking visits, with
questions ranging from wait times, interactions with bank staff, and overall
satisfaction. They may also ask customers to make suggestions for improvement.
Bank managers can use this information to help retrain staff if there are problems
with service or to identify any issues customers have with products, procedures,
and services.

In other cases, companies may use external firms to develop reports for them. For
instance, the J.D. Power survey is one of the most common examples of a
balanced scorecard. This firm provides data, insights, and advisory services to
help companies identify problems in their operations and make improvements for
the future. J.D. Power does this through surveys in various industries, including
the financial services and automotive industries. Results are compiled and
reported back to the hiring firm.
Balanced Scorecard (BSC) FAQs
What Is a Balanced Scorecard and How Does It Work?
A balanced scorecard is a strategic management performance metric that helps
companies identify and improve their internal operations to help their external
outcomes. It measures past performance data and provides organizations with
feedback on how to make better decisions in the future.
What Are the Four Perspectives of the Balanced Scorecard?
The four perspectives of a balanced scorecard are learning and growth, business
processes, customer perspectives, and financial data. These four areas, which
are also called legs, make up a company's vision and strategy. As such they

require a firm's key personnel, whether that's the executive and/or its management
team(s), to analyze the data collected in the scorecard.
How Do You Use a Balanced Scorecard?
Balanced scorecards allow companies to measure their intellectual capital along
with their financial data to break down successes and failures in their internal
processes. By compiling data from past performance in a single report,
management can identify inefficiencies, devise plans for improvement, and
communicate goals and priorities to their employees and other stakeholders.
What Are the Balanced Scorecard Benefits?
There are many benefits to using a scorecard. The most important advantages
include the ability to bring information into a single report, which can save time,
money, and resources. It also allows companies to track their performance in
service and quality in addition to tracking their financial data. Scorecards also
allow companies to recognize and reduce inefficiencies.
What Is a Balanced Scorecard Example?
Corporations may use internal methods to develop scorecards. For instance, they
may conduct customer service surveys to identify the successes and failures of

their products and services or they may hire external firms to do the work for them.
J.D. Power is an example of one such firm that is hired by companies to conduct
research on their behalf.