So you’ve decided to invest in a Business Intelligence tool – that’s half the battle. Companies around the world are leveraging business intelligence and advanced analytics to make real-time data-driven decisions but to truly make the best use of this investment, employees in the organization must start using the tool!
The success rate of a BI solution is directly related to user adoption. According to a study by Gartner, the current adoption of BI software and Analytics tools is around 30%. Given the acclaim, the adoption of the tool is disheartening.
In this blog, we talk about some tried and tested ways to increase the adoption of business intelligence software across your enterprise.
Enabling Data-Driven Business Making For Your Stakeholders
Businesses over the years have realized that making data work for them can prominently advance their goals. With this key instance of digital transformation gaining popularity, one would imagine that there would be a great deal of urgency for individuals to BI solutions. Sadly it is a known fact that employees resist change. Furthermore, adding a new tool to their work routine also contributes to a lack of adoption. Here are a few ways to solve this issue:
1. Design the platform with end-users in mind
At the end of the day, a Business Intelligence solution is implemented to benefit your end-users. Business users come in all shapes and sizes relative to their role. Your CEO’’s needs could be very different from your Sales Manager’s needs. And similarly, your Sales Manager’s needs might seem very from your support rep’s team. That is why it is most essential for the BI tool to be flexible enough to adapt to their requirements and use cases quickly. The goal of the tool is to turn facts and figure into actionable business information which helps decision-makers and end-users to make more effective data-driven decisions and streamline business processes to improve the bottom line.
Catering to users keeping their roles and duties in mind can help them find the information they need, and how they make decisions faster and more efficiently. For the BI adoption rates to improve, make sure your implementation is carried out from your user’s point of view. Investigate what they want to know and how the BI tool can help them find the right answer.
2. Ensure Data Quality
If your BI solution doesn’t deliver accurate information, your users will eventually stop trusting the tool. Inaccurate results will result in cross-checking and requiring validation from other sources. Which is not only laborious but also counterproductive. However, almost every organization today has data quality and data management problems so it should not come as a surprise that it is a difficult task to maintain quality and structured data.
One way this can be made easier is by rollout out your data analysis tool with a small and cleansed dataset. Ensuring data quality is a slow and gradual process and that is why it is essential to start small with quality data. A small start leads to small wins. Opening up access to data should also be to a handful of people and feedback can prove very beneficial as it encourages and drives proactive identification and correction of any discrepancies.
3. Choose a Unified Platform
An all-in-one Decision-Making BI system can be a useful asset to your organization and your users. A regularly synced integration with third-party tools and various data sources like HappyFox Help Desk, Salesforce CRM, Chatbot helps business decision-makers, our end-users’ information, and the data visualizations to be more holistic.
While deploying several disparate solutions may seem like an easier task at hand, it gets complicated over time creating larger issues, deterring user engagement eventually. Bringing in a tool that is integrated and unified breaks down silos and gives end-to-end insight to its users.
4. Train your employees with Best Practices
Understanding the distinct needs of each type of user and training them to use the deployed tool well – directly impacts user adoption rates. Making it easy to understand data and encouraging your employees to create their reports and dashboards can boost the adoption rate as well.
By giving them more than just login credentials and motivating them to take ownership of the tool, you encourage self-service. When using a tool like HappyFox Business Intelligence, the usability and convenience of creating reports and dashboards from scratch are made easy and intuitive.
5. Readily available repository of collateral
So the BI implementation is complete and you have trained your users. Great job! Supplementing this knowledge with a repository of BI platform How-To’s can take this experience to the next level, elevating adoption rates. Making recording or FAQs to your employees easily accessible and discoverable can help eliminate any guesswork, enhancing customer experience through self-service and decreased dependency.
Your users no longer have to run to your BI team’s desk or comb through hundreds of articles to learn how to drag and drop (Key Performance Indicators) KPI from the visualization library. Through intuitive keywords and categorizing your knowledge base well, the process of seeking help, even after a year of training, can be made easy and straightforward.
6. Creating a culture of data-driven decision making
A unified effort to foster a culture of data-driven decision making by key cross-functional stakeholders can also augment the adoption rate of the Business Intelligence platform. Encouraging employees to get on board and educating them about Data-Driven Decision Making or “DDDM” where they make informed decisions and design business strategies through deep analysis of available data have proven helpful to organizations around the world.
With greater transparency into their business and an opportunity to continuously improve their processes has never been simpler, thanks to powerful BI solutions available in the market. Embracing data can lead to your data becoming a critical enterprise asset.
7. Evaluate the usefulness of BI often
Nothing is more persuasive than hard facts when it comes to the decision-making process. This also applies to measuring the success of your solution implementation. It is vital that the tool eventually provides faster and more accurate reporting. At the end of the day, the BI tool must serve your customers well and with optimum performance at all times.
A BI tool that can scale with your business growth and that can handle a large number of users, a large amount of data, and a large volume of queries makes it easier to be utilized resulting in an increased user base.
Conclusion
Tracking metrics provide an open and transparent way for business units to perform better. With a powerful scalable business analytics system like HappyFox BI and a user adoption strategy that encourages the power of automation, emphasizes data integrity, promotes self-service, and places end-users first, cultivating champions of your BI solution becomes smoother and faster. Check out our website to know more about our intuitive and powerful Business Intelligence platform.
