Any business worth its salt is going to be keeping an eye on the purse strings. Because of this, you’re going to always need to get the very most of every cent you have access to. Budgets are rarely generous, so you need to work with what you’ve got. Never let a tight budget stop you from making BI brilliant.
BI is a super valuable tool for modern organizations to gain insights and make data-driven decisions. However, implementing and maintaining a BI system can be costly. In this article, we’ll explore how to get the most out of your BI budget and ensure that your investment in BI delivers the best return possible.
Every Step To Maximize Your BI Budget
Define Your Goals and Metrics
Before investing in BI, it’s important to define your goals and metrics. What are you trying to achieve with your BI system? What KPIs do you need to track to measure success? By defining clear goals and metrics upfront, you can ensure that your BI system is aligned with your business objectives and that you are investing in the right tools and resources going forward. It’s all about starting as you mean to go on – with intention.
Choose the Right Tools
There are a variety of BI tools on the market, each with its own strengths and use cases. Time to market is important and DEV/OPS teams need to find ways to accelerate the speed of delivery and decrease drop-outs in apps being used on a daily base.
Choosing the right tools for your business needs and budget is key. Consider factors like ease of use, scalability, and data security capabilities. Additionally, evaluate the total cost of ownership (TCO) of each tool, including licensing fees, maintenance costs, and training expenses. What might look like a tempting offer to start with can have a lot of costs buried under the surface. That’s not the case with PlatformManager – just in case you were curious.
Invest in Data Quality
One of the most significant factors that can impact the effectiveness of your BI system is the quality of your data. Bad data in will always lead to bad data out. If your data is inaccurate or incomplete, your insights and decisions will be unreliable. Therefore, investing in data quality is critical to getting the most out of your BI budget. Invest in data quality tools and processes, such as data cleansing and data profiling.
Also, establish data governance policies and procedures to ensure that your data is accurate, consistent, and up-to-date at all times, and then double down by using tools that make sure your BI apps are hooked up to the most up-to-date data sources.
Train Your Team
Investing in BI tools is all well and good, but you need people to make them actually work, and that means you need to invest in training. Ensure that anyone involved in your BI setup has the skills and knowledge necessary to use their respective tools. To make sure you continually improve on your BI setup, you’ll always have to provide ongoing training so that you can make the most of new features and data techniques.
Measure Your ROI
Finally, and linking back to the point we started with – you need to measure the ROI of your BI spend. If you’ve defined clear metrics for measuring the success of your BI system, such as increased revenue or cost savings, then you need to regularly review and analyze these metrics, and use that information to make data-driven decisions, optimize your BI investment, and maximize your budget’s power going forward. It should get easier every year.
To get the most out of your BI budget, you need to define your goals and metrics, choose the right tools, invest in data quality, train your team, and measure your ROI. By following these best practices, you can ensure that your investment in BI delivers the best ROI possible and helps you achieve your wider business objectives. If you do an excellent job, you might even get a bigger budget next time round. But don’t count on it.
The right tools can help you maximize your BI budget, and PlatformManager is definitely on that list of much-needed tech. Want to know more? Get in touch with us today.