by Angela Guess
Steve Sarnecki recently wrote in Information Management, “BI tools are not always easy to implement. Here are three tips to consider when launching your BI platform: (1) Beware of Data Quality. You may still be able to make lemonade with rotten lemons, but I guarantee it won’t taste very good and may even make you sick. Just like lemons for lemonade, for BI to be successful, you need to ensure your data is high quality. Otherwise, it won’t do its job. Lack of a data set selection, for example, can often limit users from receiving the proper data they desire or even having a comprehensive view of what their data is doing, which can be overwhelming. Frequently, collecting data via an integrator, such as a real-time sensor-based software, can result in data that isn’t ‘clean’ as is can contain errors, anomalies or other unforeseen complications.”
Sarnecki continues, “(2) Set Governance Rules. The amount of data generated today is staggering. To successfully leverage your data for BI, you need to ensure that you keep control of it in real time. Nothing is worse than drowning in data inundation. When considering adopting BI, an important step is defining how the data you gather will be processed, where it will go, how it will be stored, and many other data governance policies. Tooling, for example, is a combination of processes and governance that works together to provide a single point of reference. This helps define and manage critical data across the enterprise, which also helps users get analysis faster. The reliability of the information extracted allows users to obtain good data that they can trust, allowing them to see correlations in the data to investigate.”
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