How do you use BI to make decisions and take action?

The overall article including this section assumes there is a single person / embedded analytics team inside a business department or function (marketing, finance etc.) which is not the case in the real industry world. Usually, analytics teams work in collaboration with the other business functions enabling them to boost performance. Hence in this step, the analytics team needs to connect with functional team leaders to understand their business goals and discuss how they can be more data driven. The goals would come from functional teams like marketing, sales, finance and the like.

One of the first steps to make decisions and take action based on data, it’s definitely set a goal making right business questions and involving relevant sponsors that help you point in the right direction.

Even before to choose and source your data, it’s important to understand the business context, understand the data and to be conscious about the limitations of your data.

Although I believe visuals are the best way to present data, make sure you align your data analysis to your audience. And check your data thoroughly before presenting - always implement checks on totals etc. The other key focus is to ensure your visualisation tells the story and action you want to instil in the audience. The same chart can tell a different message with a different/truncated Y axis scale, or omitting outliers. This helps to ensure focus on the action you are trying to drive. There are also great options like data tables which can for example, supplement a discussion on covenant analysis (which will likely have 2 criteria).

Interpret the insights derived from data analysis. Understand the implications of the patterns and trends in the context of your objectives. Based on the insights, make informed decisions that align with your objectives.

Ensuring Accurate Data Representation in Visualizations, it sometimes becomes necessary to omit partial data that may not offer a complete picture. A common scenario where this practice is applicable is the representation of data for the current month, which is often not complete and can skew the comparison with the same period from the previous year. To address this, we can strategically exclude the current month's data from our visualizations, we can accomplish this using Power Query M following script, supposing a field labeled “Date”: = Table.SelectRows(#"Renamed Columns5", each not (Date.Year([Date]) = Date.Year(Date.From(DateTime.LocalNow())) and Date.Month([Date]) = Date.Month(Date.From(DateTime.LocalNow()))))

This is also something that analytics team help functional teams to do and not take decision themselves. The sponsor is the functional leader eg VP of Sales, CMO, CEO ...

Remember that BI is an iterative process, and adapting to new insights and changing circumstances is crucial. Additionally, choosing the right BI tools and training your team to use them effectively is essential for successful implementation.

Basically, I would summarize the making decisions process based on BI as follows: 1. Involve relevant sponsors 2. Make the right questions 3. Understand the trends and the business context 4. Understand the data and its limitations 5. Communicate effectively 6. Create an action plan based on the findings