7 Business Intelligence best practices for 2024

As strategic decision-makers driving organizational success, you recognize the need for reliable data-driven insights that identify risks early and illuminate new opportunities. However, accumulating data does not directly correlate to improved performance or ROI. True transformation requires concrete intelligence channeled into strategic action.

This article outlines seven proven practices for developing an enterprise-wide Business Intelligence capability. These practices translate complex data into clarity, focus, and competitive advantage tailored to your priorities. We also explore strategies for accelerating capability development by forming a solid partnership that cost-effectively closes experience and skill gaps within internal teams. With the right BI approach anchored in your most vital operational and strategic goals, previously hidden patterns and trends become visible at last.

The importance of Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence has moved beyond being a nice-to-have asset to an indispensable capability—especially amidst exponential data growth across sectors. However, materializing value takes much more than deploying analytics software and dashboards. True BI-driven transformation requires establishing adaptive foundations through research-backed methodologies focused on governance, scalability, and usability. The possibilities are vast when BI ecosystems become flexible, trusted extensions of organizational decision networks.

Capitalizing on established Business Intelligence best practices enables:

• More accurate analysis based on high-quality, integrated data from across the business;
• Intuitive reporting tailored to the needs of diverse users, ensuring insights are accessible and actionable;
• Scalable and cost-efficient systems able to expand alongside operational and analytical demands;
• Secure analytics safeguarded by robust data governance and compliance protocols;
• Continuous innovation cycles for improving BI speed, quality, and impact through new techniques.

7 Business Intelligence best practices

Business intelligence platforms have evolved from specialized data reporting tools to enterprise-wide drivers of decision-making and competitive advantages. However, achieving the full potential of BI requires a thoughtful approach grounded in proven methodologies. Key focus areas include promoting data quality and governance, enhancing the user experience, integrating insights across systems, scaling capabilities, enabling continuous improvement, and more.

1. Data quality management

Flawed data severely hampers analysis and decisions. Prioritize the partnership with a company with proven expertise in continuous cleansing, standardizing, and governing data quality through automated and manual processes. When allying with a BI provider, seek capabilities like duplicate identification, accuracy checks, transformation scripts, and stewardship programs that drive end-to-end accuracy. Robust data monitoring, issue remediation, and protocols enforcing uniform formats create consistency across systems. Quality data management paves the way for reliable insights.

2. User-centric design

If BI tools confuse and frustrate users, adoption stagnates along with value. Your technical partner should showcase user-centric design, including quantitative research, iterative prototyping, and role-based customization. This user-centric design should be driven by regular feedback across user types and proficiency levels. Intuitive navigation, guided analysis flows, and self-service reporting enable usage growth. The most insightful back end is worthless without an accessible, engaging front end aligned to evolving user needs over time through a user-focused process.

3. Integration with existing systems

Integration avoids disruptive rip-and-replace scenarios by creating a unified workflow. The preferred approach is to establish cooperation with a partner with proven success in linking BI with existing heterogeneous databases, applications, and data sources through modern APIs, cloud data warehousing, and real-time data synchronization. Take advantage of dedicated IT cooperation to map technical specifications to business goals. Integration facilitates timely data availability for analysis while minimizing disruption across technology environments.

4. Scalability and flexibility

This principle ensures that BI systems can cost-effectively evolve to meet changing analytics needs due to data growth, new data sources, and shifting business requirements. Modular architectures, cloud-based solutions, adaptable data models, and monitoring adoption of innovations are key enablers. In particular, architects should design analytical data stores to incorporate additional fields or dimensions over time easily. Processes to retire or archive stale data should also be established.

5. Regular reporting and analytics

Analytics and regular reporting provide actionable visibility into performance versus goals and benchmarks. This requires automated reporting for consistent metrics, interactive dashboards to support drill-down analysis, scheduled stakeholder reviews, and predictive techniques to determine future trends and outcomes. Schedule monthly or quarterly results review meetings for business leaders across functions to discuss trends, drill into root causes, and align action plans.

6. Data security and compliance

Without proper safeguards, data exposures precipitously erode trust. Leading BI providers implement layered controls, including access restrictions, encryption, activity audit trails, de-identification, and staff security training. Tailored permissions help balance usability for analysts while restricting exposure of sensitive attributes. You should verify the provider has extensive experience conforming to primary regulatory compliance mandates such as ISO 27001, PCI DSS, and GDPR. Compliance with these standards helps prevent violations through accountability and transparency.

7. Continuous improvement and innovation

This principle helps sustain competitive advantages and capabilities. Gathering user feedback, investing in R&D for new techniques/technologies, embracing agile deployment methodologies, and benchmarking against the market ensure BI systems remain relevant, efficient, and additive over time. Allocate a portion of the BI budget for evaluating and piloting emerging innovations. Run proofs of concept for automation and AI tools for tasks like data preparation, predictions, and natural language queries.

Organizations can shift from hindsight-based reporting to predictive, prescriptive analytics by aligning BI strategies with research-backed best practices. More than isolated software implementations, contemporary Business Intelligence best practices establish a living ecosystem of data, infrastructure, and skills working in concert to activate business insights. Of course, frameworks must adapt to match needs and priorities over time. By ingraining agility, governance, and user-centricity into Business Intelligence DNA from the outset, companies equip these platforms as catalysts for and beneficiaries of data-driven evolution.

Read more: Successful implementation of Business Intelligence: An ultimate guide

Business Intelligence success stories

Bringing business intelligence initiatives to life requires a combination of strategic vision and specialized technical execution. These stories showcase how custom analytics solution design enabled by N-iX expertise in areas like data integration, platform optimization, and Cloud migration unlocked enhanced visibility and faster decisions for clients. The result is that future-ready BI foundations are better positioned to drive growth.

Driving growth in ecommerce with a custom BI solution

Cleverbridge, specializing in ecommerce and subscription management, faced the need to upgrade its data analytics reporting for a major customer. It involved creating more detailed and visually engaging reports on client subscriptions, such as revenue and new customer data.

Our approach:

N-iX initiated a Product Discovery for a comprehensive data strategy essential for developing a sophisticated BI solution. This process included utilizing AWS Database Migration Service (DMS) and Dynamics 365 REST API for real-time data retrieval from Oracle databases and Dynamics 365, respectively. Data was then integrated into Snowflake, a cloud data platform, to facilitate the use of Power BI for developing advanced BI reports.

Value delivered:

• Enhanced BI reporting. By developing a comprehensive BI solution, N-iX significantly improved Cleverbridge's ability to provide detailed and visually rich analytics reports, directly addressing the client's needs.
• Internal analytical capabilities. Cleverbridge leveraged this solution internally, gaining deeper insights into the client's performance, which supported better business decisions.
• Market competitiveness. The enhanced BI capabilities helped cleverbridge expand its market presence, attracting more customers with improved Data Analytics services.
• Data security enhancement: Implementing robust data governance further strengthened the security and reliability of Cleverbridge's data infrastructure.

Read more: Driving growth in e-commerce with a comprehensive data analytics solution

Faster time to market with N-iX's BI expertise

Lebara, a leading mobile virtual network operator in Europe, needed to improve its legacy IT infrastructure for enhanced scalability, agility, and faster time to market. This transformation was crucial to support their expansion and growing customer base.

Our approach:

In response to Lebara's needs, N-iX formed a dedicated R&D center with over 100 specialists, delivering comprehensive support for Lebara's digital transformation. This involved several key initiatives:

• Hybris platform migration and enhancement. The team focused on upgrading Lebara's Hybris B2C platform to manage its growing client base better and deliver a seamless omnichannel experience. This upgrade included developing a single master data system and a custom test automation framework.
• BI optimization. N-iX contributed significantly to the enhancement of Lebara's BI capabilities. This involved optimizing the performance of the existing BI solution, cutting down report delays, streamlining the support team, and reducing overheads.
• Cloud migration and microservices development. A critical part of the transformation was migrating Lebara's solutions from on-premises to a cloud environment. By adopting a multi-cloud strategy with AWS and Azure and transitioning to Azure Kubernetes Services, N-iX ensured cost savings and greater flexibility in operations.

Value delivered:

• Optimized digital operations. Business processes were streamlined, and the management of commerce data flows was improved, resulting in a better omnichannel user experience.
• Enhanced BI solutions. The development of an Azure-based data lake optimized BI report generation, enabling timely and scalable reporting across departments.
• Effective cloud strategy. Implementing a multi-cloud approach ensured better operational flexibility and significantly reduced infrastructure expenses while improving scalability.
• Market expansion. The digital transformation initiatives spearheaded by N-iX empowered Lebara to penetrate new markets more effectively, accelerating the introduction of new features and enhancing its overall market presence.

Read more: Faster time-to-market with full-scale digital transformation in telecom

Bottom line

Implementing robust Business Intelligence hinges on uniting the right capabilities, from data infrastructure to advanced analytics and visualizations. Though great value awaits in the form of faster, confident decisions, an effective solution requires alignment to crucial Business Intelligence best practices—from ensuring data quality to driving user adoption.

While internal domain knowledge is irreplaceable, external partnerships provide specialized skills for designing, building, and maximizing enterprise-grade BI. By collaborating with an experienced service provider, organizations benefit from technical acumen honed across industries to accelerate a tailored solution. The result is an intelligent foundation where data actively informs strategy and operations.

The right partners help activate BI's full potential as an integral business transformer underpinning sustainable data-driven advantage. With our comprehensive consulting and services spanning the BI lifecycle, we empower organizations to enhance performance through targeted insights. At N-iX, our tailored solutions deliver value from implementation to automation. Let us show you how transformative Business Intelligence best practices are within reach today.