To succeed in any business arena, having a strategy is always recommended. Without an effective strategy, the business remains unguided and directionless which can lead to severe failures and sometimes huge monetary compensations. In a company where everything can be transformed in a minute through one decision, it is important to have a better decision-making process to tighten every loose end that might cause problems further. Therefore, for better decision-making and a reactive approach to saving costs, BI is extremely necessary. And while adopting BI technologies having an appropriate strategy is quintessential. If a company fails to optimize a BI strategy, it can leave a lot of money on the table in the form of missed opportunities to improve efficiency and tap into new revenue streams.

Businesses usually take BI lightly but they must realize that it can create sincere impacts on business processes for good or even for worse if not implemented properly. According to Tech Funnel, here are the four signs where leaders should consider improving their BI strategy for better.

The companies should not consider BI as a reporting tool only. Rather it serves much more than simply generating reports. Today BI is about allowing employees to ask questions of data, drill deeper into interactive charts and even discover answers to questions they haven’t yet thought to ask.

According to Gartner, there are two different eras of BI. One is traditional BI in which IT professionals used in-house data to generate reports, and second is modern BI “where business users interact with agile, intuitive systems to analyze data more quickly.”

The modernization across the business industry has leveraged the potentials of modern BI more than the traditional one. The modern BI platforms help democratize data which means giving wide access to all users, rather than treating specialized teams as the gatekeepers of BI reporting. Not confined to that, modern BI can even do a lot more stuff.

For example, Search-driven analytics tools allow all types of users to ask ad hoc questions in plain language and receive answers back in seconds. Moreover, AI-enabled analytics tools like SpotIQ from ThoughtSpot send algorithms deep into data to detect trends and anomalies, before automatically porting them to human users to support decision-making activities.

As we known data used to be the domain of IT specialists, rather than the general workforce. However, this approach is changing for the better as organizations embrace data democratization. Data siloes which are isolated sources of information, inhibit collaboration and can have different departments operating based on differing data, depending on which silo they can access. If a company still performs in this manner rather than from a centralized, accessible single source of truth, then its BI strategy should be improved for a better approach.

Additionally, witnessing BI reporting backlogs can also cause both data siloes and general inaccessibility of information to decision-makers across an organization. The basic reason behind the backlog or delay could be an overwhelming volume of requests coming in from other teams to IT specialists while filtering the flow of data. In such a situation it is highly recommended to bring about changes in the company’s BI strategy if employees are facing wait times of days, weeks or months to get the insights they need.

Lastly, low usage and adoption rate of BI strategy and tools by employees across an organization can also be a problem where the company should take immediate action. Most employees do not use BI tools as a part of their regular workflow which causes usability issues. Due to the lack of comfort of employees working with data, the company can turn into the insufficient firm and its data-related issues will hold back it from really capitalizing on what the data is saying.

Therefore, if any of these signs appear at your organization you should take immediate and appropriate action to transform your BI strategy for better workflow and data efficiency.