Every enterprise needs a business intelligence (BI) strategy to support data-driven decision-making. You probably have an in-house team to manage your day-to-day analytics. But is your data practice supporting your long-term vision?
If you’re struggling with BI chaos in your organization, you’re not alone. Each piece of the puzzle, from designing an infrastructure to driving user adoption, must come together seamlessly to support your organization’s big-picture strategy.
You can’t throw spaghetti against the wall and hope something will stick. Instead, take the time to set a solid foundation for your BI strategy through a process we call Visioning.
What is Visioning?
Collectiv’s Visioning Program is a strategic process where we create a blueprint to help our enterprise clients navigate their data journey and execute data initiatives over the next one to three years. During the process, we uncover the priorities of various stakeholders and help the client gain a holistic view of how all the moving parts come together.
Visioning informs how you update your infrastructure to leverage the latest BI tools (i.e. Power BI) and data practices to support various business activities, including financial planning and analysis (FP&A), and product development.
At its core, the program is a management consulting engagement that facilitates the implementation of BI strategies to help you get the most value out of your data.
At the end of the process, you’ll have a roadmap outlining how you can execute your BI strategy to get from point A to point B over the next 6, 12, or 18 months to support your overall business objectives.
How Does Visioning Work?
Our Visioning Program starts with a conversation with various stakeholders in the organization. We learn what they want to achieve with their data, then we identify a core focus area.
From there, we conduct a series of conversations with everyone (not just the decision-makers) who will be involved with the input or output of the BI initiative. The discovery process gives us an in-depth understanding of the organization’s needs, so we are able to connect the dots and paint a cohesive picture for the blueprint.
The process and outcome are very different for different organizations. For example, we may outline a technical architecture for a client’s backend data infrastructure or even an entire SaaS product. Other clients may get a strategic plan to implement data governance policies, roll out a Power BI program, or train their teams to drive adoption.
The Benefits of Visioning
Business intelligence is a large, complicated, and ever-changing subject for organizations of any size. Even enterprises with mature data practices and experienced resources can’t cover every aspect of BI.
Internal teams are often knee-deep in day-to-day operations and confined to industry-specific knowledge. The Collectiv team lives and breathes BI strategies and technologies. We have seen it all in every industry.
In our Visioning Program, we approach each project with a fresh perspective and take a 50,000-foot view of your current and future business needs to design a strategy that supports your vision.
We apply the latest learning and best practices across industries to think out of the box, cover all your bases, overcome blind spots, put you on the right track, and design a scalable and flexible infrastructure to support a mature data practice as you grow.
We consider the entire initiative to complete your data strategy so you won’t get stuck with piecemeal projects that go nowhere. Since we address the needs of all users, you’ll get the internal buy-in you need to turn the vision into reality.
What Can Visioning Do for Us?
Visioning addresses different facets of our clients’ data initiatives, from implementing a BI initiative within a specific department (i.e. finance, HR) to enterprise-wide adoption and governance. We also help clients roll out their programs with the right level of governance and oversight to optimize adoption.
Our Visioning Program supports product development initiatives as well. For example, we helped an enterprise strategize a project to build a SaaS reporting offering on top of Power BI and within the Microsoft data stack to sell to their customers.
We defined the architecture they needed by pulling together elements from Power BI and Azure. We talked to many engineers in the organization about the nuts and bolts of each system, then created a blueprint that detailed how they could build on their existing infrastructure and bring the product to market most cost-effectively.
The versatility of the Visioning Program means you can zoom in on a specific project or zoom out to get a long-term strategy while building confidence that you’re addressing every aspect of key BI initiatives.
Contact us to see how we customize Collectiv’s Visioning Program to help your team both envision and achieve enterprise BI success.
