So ING Direct is in the news of the Capital one buy out, but being a BI geek what really caught my attention was the speech that Greg Nichelsen (ING’s head of BI customer insight) gave to the Australian Gartner BI Summit.
In the speech he gave 12 tips on BI summarized here
While they are all worthy of following I did want to focus in on the top two tips as they are particularly wise.
2: Data and knowledge
“Having lots of data doesn’t solve business problems and reports aren’t knowledge,” Nichelsen said. “You should regularly review where you are and the value you are getting from data.”
1: Get your data experts together
“The real power of data comes from end to end team work and common goals,” Nichelesen said
The key thing in the #2 tip comes in the line, “Having lots of data doesn’t solve business problems and reports aren’t knowledge,”. I’ve said this before, I believe I called them “Elephant questions” in prior posts (questions that might be interesting but not useful). Too many times we let people that are in love with the data create the presentation face of our reports but without a true understanding of what they are trying to fix. Two very good questions to always ask when building a report are, 1) “What does this report really tell me?” and 2) “Do I care?”
His #1 point would also be my #1 point “The real power of data comes from end to end team work and common goals ,” It’s the end to end bit that is crucial. Many times teams work in silos and there is a lack of overall vision to make it all tie. Sales will be measuring one number, while marketing pays attention to another, and finance yet another. In the end when they begin to compare their goals together it’s little surprise that many are left feeling that their princess have been moved to another castle and rightly so.
Overall a good set of tips for any implementation.
