Biz Intelligence: Investment or Shiny Toy ?
“I think if companies could see at a glance, where and how much their investment in BI is bolstering their value chain, they’d want to see that”
Business Intelligence As An Investment
At FreshBI our stated purpose has evolved over the years from ‘Build Smart Stuff’ to what it is now: ‘Create A ROI For Our Partners’. Our reason behind building enduring solutions, behind presenting Power BI Training, behind driving Power BI Adoption, etc. is to improve the performance of our partners’ businesses.
A company that manufactures aircraft parts for example, can benefit significantly from visualizing the relationship between demand for parts and the manufacturing schedule. This benefit can be measured through improved inventory holdings, reduced waste, improved capacity planning, an efficient sales cycle and ultimately a happier partner. And each of these benefits can be measured to offer an incremental and aggregated benefit received from their investment in Business Intelligence.
Our Early Days Of Measuring ROI
The Dashboard below was our first attempt and measuring the ROI for each of our partners’ investment in Business Intelligence. I still see this Dashboard as one offering immense value and we still use this Dashboard to show the state of affairs for each site. The challenge with it though is that the ROI does not jump out visually and it does not show the Incremental ROI throughout the organizational value chain.
So We Spawned The Incremental ROI Dashboard…
As our partners attest to, our subscription offering is a high-value offering and because the subscription offering is pure Agile, it drives lively weekly conversations with our partners. In addition, we meet with the project owner every month to ensure alignment and ensure that they continue to receive the most value possible from their investment in BI.
We learn a lot from talking with our partners and in the monthly meetings we go through what we’ve accomplished to date, what the goals are for BI for the next 3 months and based on what the dashboards were measuring, how we guessed that the organization is benefiting financially from using the dashboards. What we found though was that as we measured the ‘benefit of analytics about the sales pipeline’, it was revealing how this information was also benefiting Marketing, Manufacturing Planning and Inventory Management.
This aspect of Inter-Relatedness of the business functions spurred us to dig deeper and start to measure the incremental value received by the business at each stage in the value chain.
And so, although fledgeling, the Incremental ROI Dashboard for Business Intelligence was conceived.
Since we have been using it, we have realized many benefits of looking at the investment in BI this way:
Weighted Benefit: We can now see how the benefit received from Business Intelligence is weighted across the organization
Utilization By Function: When we compare the benefit of each stage to the investment made at each stage we get intel on utilization by function
Opportunities: This is one we experience often - when we see a zero benefit at any place in the value chain then we know we have identified an opportunity to add value there with Business intelligence.
Peace Of Mind: Executives and Project Owners are assured that their investment in BI is generating an income
So What’s Next For Showing our Partners How They’re Benefiting From Their Investment In BI ?
I recognize that the Dashboard above is over-simplified. We see this as a great beginning to what ultimately will be the Dashboard that our partners use to make decisions about their continued investment in Business Intelligence. I envision us elaborating on the make-up of the numbers in the Dashboard and adding a component that measures the benefit of organizational change injected by becoming a Data-Savvy organization.
And last but most import, we should recognize that all benefit received from Business Intelligence is only as good as the Adoption of Business Intelligence by each person in the organization. Business Intelligence Adoption has to be measured and factored into the measurement of the Return On Investment from Business Intelligence. We’re working on including Adoption into the Dashboard above and having the magnitude that it does, Adoption will get its own blog post to meet the world.
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About FreshBI
Operating throughout USA and Canada, FreshBI is a boutique Microsoft Partner using Power BI to unlock the value trapped in your data so that your business can succeed.