Whenever I speak at an event, regardless of what BI topic I’m covering, I always like to share this thought, “The purpose of business intelligence is to optimize each and every defining business process to produce maximum results.”  Engraft this belief into your BI ideology and you will have stable ground to stand on.  Let’s talk about what a defining process is.

An organization’s ultimate goal is to maximize its profitability – whether that’s in financial revenue as a business or in goodwill as a non-profit.  You want your business model to produce best-case results.  To do this, you must deconstruct the model into its many different processes and optimize the ones that matter – the ones that define the business.  Don’t all processes impact the overall profitability?  Yes, technically this is true.  But not all processes are what you as a business can inherently be best at.

The processes that define your business require special attention for optimization.  After all, this is what makes you unique and this is why people buy your products and/or services instead of your competitors.  Rampantly use BI to master each of these processes.  Then expand your analysis to optimize the groups of processes that function together.  Do this repeatedly until you have optimized your whole business to its maximum potential.

But what about the other processes we do?  These don’t define you; they define a different company’s level of success.  Outsource to them.  They will probably be better at it than you and more cost-effective in the long run.  Plus, you will get the benefit of having the best possible solution for both your defining and secondary processes.

Not sure which processes you should focus your BI efforts on?  ConradBI can help.  We can work with you to identify the ones that matter – the processes that define the success of your business.  We can also help you find actionable insights that will get the maximum results.  We’re here to help.