How Business Intelligence Helps Ensure Digital Transformation Success

Digital transformation is no longer a novelty restricted to the world’s most renowned companies. It’s becoming the norm for all organizations, whether you’re running a small startup or a global conglomerate.

Successful digital transformation will provide your business with various benefits, including increased efficiency and productivity. Also, it minimizes operational costs and helps deliver a frictionless customer experience. It’s particularly useful for providing easy access and mobility to a hybrid workforce.

Digital Transformation Challenges

While most companies realize the importance of digital transformation, they struggle to harness its benefits. It’s because they treat digital transformation as any other IT project that involves digitizing systems and processes.

They assume it’s as simple as adopting new digital technologies and migrating data and applications to the cloud.

Business leaders fail to understand that digital transformation affects a company’s people and processes equally. A seamless transition requires you to make a series of effective data-driven decisions instead of relying on your experience and intuition.

That’s where business intelligence (BI) comes into play. Advanced BI tools, such as Microsoft’s Power BI, help business leaders and C-suite executives make the right decisions based on accurate data and actionable insights.

We’ll take a closer look at the role of BI in digital transformation in the following sections. Let’s jump right in.

Business Intelligence and Digital Transformation: Understanding the Connection

Simply put, digital transformation involves the following three steps:

• Strategy
• Implementation
• Measurement

While strategy is all about outlining your goals and vision, implementation is the step where you execute your digital transformation strategy. Measurement involves monitoring digital transformation progress and understanding its impact on different departments.

It’s an overarching view of how digital transformation works in most companies. What’s worth noting is that data and decision-making play crucial roles at every step. Whether defining goals or measuring digital transformation success, you need to collect, process, and analyze data from different sources.

While your organization has no shortage of data, converting it into accurate insights can be challenging. In the absence of proper BI tools, you’ll struggle to make sense of the collected data. That, in turn, will make it difficult to outline and implement your digital transformation strategy.

Advanced BI tools help you predict the impact of digital transformation on different business functions and processes. That, in turn, makes it easier to identify areas worth digitizing.

Also, BI tools provide you with an overview of how digital transformation will impact different departments. It helps you deploy customized training programs to handhold each department through the transition.

BI tools serve as a bridge between an organization’s data sources and decision-makers. They help business leaders and department heads make data-driven decisions and measure the impact throughout the digital transformation journey.

How to Use BI Tools for Digital Transformation

Start by identifying suitable business intelligence tools, and build a powerful toolbox. Look for tools like Power BI that transform complex data into charts and graphs, thus simplifying the process of deriving actionable insights from data.

The next step is to ensure that employees, department heads, and C-suite executives are well-versed with the selected BI tools. If you’ve chosen Power BI as one of the tools, encourage your people to join Power BI training programs.

A well-designed Power BI training program is instrumental in helping organizations understand the platform’s nuances and harness its benefits. You can learn more about different features and find ways to customize the tool according to your needs.

Next, it’s time to integrate your BI tools with other tech solutions you’re already using. These include customer relationship management (CRM) software, cloud storage solutions, website analytics tools, etc. The idea is to ensure that BI tools have access to key data sources that’ll influence digital transformation success.

Lastly, it’s essential to measure the performance of your digital transformation strategy using BI tools. Use analytics and insights from these tools to determine whether you’re getting the desired results and identify areas that need improvement.

In Conclusion

Successful digital transformation requires the seamless integration of people, processes, and technology. Business intelligence tools help bridge the gap between an organization’s technology and human resources.

Also, they help business leaders make the right decisions to ensure the proper execution and optimization of different digital technologies. Focus on using new-age BI tools to collect data from different systems and use that data to inform your decision-making throughout the digital transformation process.