The Three Species of Business Intelligence
BY LAUREN DREXLER – CLIENT DIRECTOR
AND MARK GONZALES – SENIOR CUSTOMER TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANT
“How did you not notice this before?”
That was the question that the media, and many scientists, asked when it was announced in September 2016 that researchers had concluded that giraffes—animals that stand 20 feet tall and weigh up to 2,600 pounds—were not one species of animal, but four. How can we not notice something so fundamental when it’s huge and staring us in the face?
We reflected on this story during a recent conference while listening to the various descriptions of business intelligence teams. “They are the people who ensure that the organization has reporting that keeps the pulse of the business,” said some. “They are the people who are supposed to make all of an organization’s business users data-enabled and data-driven,” said others. “They are the data scientists that look for customer insights from the data,” said pretty much everyone.
Much like giraffes, there isn’t just one species of business intelligence, but three: core, reporting, and strategic. They’ve been staring us in the face for long enough. Now it’s time to organize accordingly to maximize the benefits of this inherent diversity.
CORE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: INSIGHT ENABLERS
The purpose of the core business intelligence team is to supply the organization—including the other two BI teams—with actionable data. If you’ve read Mark and Chuck’s article on structuring data ecosystems, then you know you should have separate storage and operational uses for your unstructured, transactional data and your structured, indexed data (and if you haven’t, it’s worth a read).
Assuming your IT department is managing the unstructured data feeds and environments to ensure that there is clean data flowing into our systems, who should be responsible for transforming all of that raw data into actionable, structured data? That’s where the core BI team comes in.
A core BI team should:
- Generate customer IDs.
- Create and maintain a customer-oriented analytical data layer—including databases, data cubes, and other stores—that matches the performance needs and expectations of the business users (here’s another plug for that article mentioned above—it dives into this topic much more deeply).
- Transform source data into the customer-oriented analytical data layer for business users to use for reporting, analytics, and KPI tracking.
- Enable the analytical tool sets and platforms the entire organization uses, as the tools are designed to go hand-in-hand with the analytical layer. This includes SQL, reporting and data visualization tools and software, email service platforms, integrated marketing platforms, and any other systems that need to leverage customer data.
If we’re collecting as much data about our customers as we can (and we should be!), we need to load the valuable bits into an environment where our teams can use it and access it quickly. That’s the job of the core BI team.
STRATEGIC: INSIGHT HUNTERS
When most people think of business intelligence, they are really thinking of the strategic business intelligence function. Those are your analysts, your data scientists, or as we lovingly call them at Elicit—your “nerds.” Members of the strategic BI team will spend their days mining the data for gold (using the analytical data layer created by the core BI team, of course).
A strategic BI team should:
- Look for patterns in customer data that are useful for other business units like marketing, product, and customer service.
- Build customer attributes that are eventually productionized in the analytical data layer.
- Build descriptive and predictive models to help answer challenging business questions or to inform business decisions.
- Socialize insights and model findings throughout the organization.
We frequently staff our entire BI team with people that really belong on a strategic BI team. Data scientists like to hunt for insights, but when they’re tasked with maintaining data structures and generating reports, there isn’t much time left for data mining. When you let your data scientists focus on insight hunting, you will immediately begin to see improvements in the amount and quality of your customer understanding.
REPORTING: INSIGHT DISTRIBUTORS
What’s the point of collecting and analyzing customer data if you aren’t going to make it accessible to the people that actually need it? Reporting is critical and oftentimes undervalued or fragmented across an organization. Do you want consistent, understandable, and comprehensive reporting and KPI tracking? Create and appropriately staff a reporting BI team.
The reporting BI team should:
- Create and maintain standard reporting to keep a pulse on all aspects of the business.
- Be the source of truth for metric and KPI definition.
- Deliver standardized data cuts and views, based on defined business metrics and KPIs.
- Make reports as accessible, easy to understand, and widely available as possible. UX testing should be conducted to understand how reports are used and interpreted, and adjustments to the reports should be made accordingly.
- Work with executives to design specific reports and report access just for them (for example, simple reports that can be accessed from their mobile phones).
While the creation of the analytical data layer will enable teams across your organization to generate their own reports as needed, having a centralized reporting BI team will ensure information is disseminated regularly, accurately, and in an easy to consume manner.
While outsiders often look at business intelligence as one monolithic function—or one species of data professional—there are three species that we must recognize and organize around to be effective. Whether or not these functions fall within the same team depends on your organization’s size, skills, and structure, but all three functions need to exist.
The fact that there are different species matters, especially to the giraffes.
The Three Species of Business Intelligence
BY LAUREN DREXLER – CLIENT DIRECTOR
AND MARK GONZALES – SENIOR CUSTOMER TECHNOLOGY CONSULTANT
“How did you not notice this before?”
That was the question that the media, and many scientists, asked when it was announced in September 2016 that researchers had concluded that giraffes—animals that stand 20 feet tall and weigh up to 2,600 pounds—were not one species of animal, but four[1]Really. They just figured this out. Perhaps they should have asked the giraffes. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2016/09/genetic_analysis_reveals_that_giraffes_are_in_fact_four_distinct_species.html. How can we not notice something so fundamental when it’s huge and staring us in the face?
We reflected on this story during a recent conference while listening to the various descriptions of business intelligence teams. “They are the people who ensure that the organization has reporting that keeps the pulse of the business,” said some. “They are the people who are supposed to make all of an organization’s business users data-enabled and data-driven,” said others. “They are the data scientists that look for customer insights from the data,” said pretty much everyone.
Much like giraffes, there isn’t just one species of business intelligence, but three: core, reporting, and strategic. They’ve been staring us in the face for long enough. Now it’s time to organize accordingly to maximize the benefits of this inherent diversity.
CORE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE: INSIGHT ENABLERS
The purpose of the core business intelligence team is to supply the organization—including the other two BI teams—with actionable data. If you’ve read Mark and Chuck’s article on structuring data ecosystems, then you know you should have separate storage and operational uses for your unstructured, transactional data and your structured, indexed data (and if you haven’t, it’s worth a read).
Assuming your IT department is managing the unstructured data feeds and environments to ensure that there is clean data flowing into our systems, who should be responsible for transforming all of that raw data into actionable, structured data? That’s where the core BI team comes in.
A core BI team should:
If we’re collecting as much data about our customers as we can (and we should be!), we need to load the valuable bits into an environment where our teams can use it and access it quickly. That’s the job of the core BI team.
STRATEGIC: INSIGHT HUNTERS
When most people think of business intelligence, they are really thinking of the strategic business intelligence function. Those are your analysts, your data scientists, or as we lovingly call them at Elicit—your “nerds.” Members of the strategic BI team will spend their days mining the data for gold (using the analytical data layer created by the core BI team, of course).
A strategic BI team should:
We frequently staff our entire BI team with people that really belong on a strategic BI team. Data scientists like to hunt for insights, but when they’re tasked with maintaining data structures and generating reports, there isn’t much time left for data mining. When you let your data scientists focus on insight hunting, you will immediately begin to see improvements in the amount and quality of your customer understanding.
REPORTING: INSIGHT DISTRIBUTORS
What’s the point of collecting and analyzing customer data if you aren’t going to make it accessible to the people that actually need it? Reporting is critical and oftentimes undervalued or fragmented across an organization. Do you want consistent, understandable, and comprehensive reporting and KPI tracking? Create and appropriately staff a reporting BI team.
The reporting BI team should:
While the creation of the analytical data layer will enable teams across your organization to generate their own reports as needed, having a centralized reporting BI team will ensure information is disseminated regularly, accurately, and in an easy to consume manner.
While outsiders often look at business intelligence as one monolithic function—or one species of data professional—there are three species that we must recognize and organize around to be effective. Whether or not these functions fall within the same team depends on your organization’s size, skills, and structure, but all three functions need to exist.
The fact that there are different species matters, especially to the giraffes.
Footnotes [ + ]
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