What does good business intelligence look like? That’s the question we’re answering in this episode of Late Night Brew with Robert Buktenica and Brian Gilligan. Tonight, our guys will dive deep into the importance of being guided by your ‘why’ and knowing what outcome you want to achieve—all while having a drink.
So, grab a drink of your own as we talk about how you can create good BI.
TIMESTAMP
00:07 – Introduction
00:28 – The Brew
01:03 – What does good business intelligence look like?
TRANSCRIPT
Introduction
Robert: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Late Night Brew, where we talk the brews first and then we get around what we’re supposed to after. Joining me for the fourth episode of this wonderful series, again, is Brian. Welcome back, buddy.
Brian: Hello, again.
The Brew
Robert: Now, before we get into the meat of it, you know what the deal is. What brew are you having with me this morning?
Brian: All right, this morning, I’m having a Blue Moon which is a beautiful wheat beer that we just recently been able to get here in Australia. Once I saw it on the menu, I was grabbing it.
Robert: Understandable, I’ve got myself a Salted Lime Lager from one of my favorite local breweries, SanTan. It’s that lovely light drinking as it heats up, you know, we’re getting, entering in summer so it’s nice easy drinking and flavorful.
What does good business intelligence look like?
Robert: In this one, in this episode, I should say, we’re going to be diving into what do we get out of working with all this data. Now the last one, last episode, I should say, we talked about all of the ingredients and the work that goes into prepping a good meal as the analogy. Now, what does that finished meal look like, or bringing it back into what we’re supposed to be talking about and not being hungry, what does good business intelligence, good BI look like?
Brian: Yes, I think this is a great way to bringing in when we talk about a meal and we talk about that ingredients. You can have all those things, but when I think about good BI, me personally, coming from a business background, it’s really about BI that aligns to the business strategy.
It’s really, it’s about defining the why. If you’re going to have a report, you’re going to have BI, what’s the purpose? What’s the business case that you’re going to have come out of it.
If you think about something like an agile methodology, they have a great concept of user stories. In user stories is this idea that you think about when you’re developing something. If you’re a finance or sales manager, you want a report that’s going to help you drive sales. It’s not just about numbers, and it’s not just about insight, it’s about how is this going to lead to more sales and more profitability.
When you think about building reports, that’s really what you want to do. You want to bring all those good ingredients together, but in a way that’s going to answer the why or give you more. I’ve been fortunate enough in my BI career, I’ve worked with a lot of different organisations from pharmaceutical, working with scientists to help cure cancer, all the way to being on the front line with cybersecurity teams trying to protect the company’s data and people’s personal data.
The one story I think is really good, because they have a purpose, that I always love to tell is working with a football team. Now, a football team is a really great example because it’s very simple. What do they want to do, what are they trying to do as an organisation? Well, they want to win. They want to win a premiership.
Robert: Play good football.
Brian: Exactly, they want to play good football but they want to win. I got a chance in this one to work with the sports science team, and when I asked them what is the purpose of this report, what are you trying to do? They’re like, “We want to win.” But in order to win a premiership, we need to have our athletes in peak performance, and we need our athletes to be healthy. We need to avoid injury.
The project was really, really quite fascinating because they have all this equipment, they have all of this data. And what we really were able to do is bring that together like that really nice meal and come up with BI, a report that really distilled that but really tapped into those particular points. And so you really did, you were able to see really quickly whether an athlete was performing well, whether they were going to get injured. You could really see it, really fantastic.
The other reason why it’s a great story about BI, is that particular team is now the reigning premieres.
Robert: Oh, really?
Brian: That was a few years ago, they’re on the top.
Robert: It’s not a humble brag or anything there, you know.
Brian: That’s a brag, but it worked. That was a few years ago, but it is. It just demonstrates that they came into it knowing not much about BI but really more about what they wanted to achieve with the data. I think my recommendation to anybody that’s in the space is that when you are building those reports, it’s good, you do need all those things, all the technical aspects to it, but my opinion is, the big thing you really need to know is the why.
Robert: Right, and that’s a beautiful way to say, you know, this is why we’re going towards this outcome, why do we want good BI, good business intelligence. Also, what we talked about in a previous episode where you can have all the data in the world, and if you’re not building those relationships, you’re not doing it intelligently, it’s meaningless, it’s noise.
I have thousands of data points, yes, what does it mean though, right? Yes, you have it, but you can’t do anything with it.
I think the point, if I heard it correctly, and correct me is with that in mind of having that data, it’s have a purpose with it, what’s the outcome I’m driving towards?
Like you said, we want to win, we want to play good, that’s the outcome. We have all these data, what do we do with it when we come into this type of engagement or this type of thought process. It translates into a lot of other tech as well or cybersecurity, right? What’s the outcome?
Brian: What are we trying to achieve?
Robert: Yes, because if you know where you’re trying to go, the journey is going to make itself known. Okay, I have to take this step.
Brian: It helps so much. It’s returning to that user story. As you get into the detail and you’re trying to build these things out, whether it’s BI or other things, you should always be keeping in mind what’s the goal, because that will answer a lot of the questions that come up so easily.
Should we have this data? Well, probably not. Is it leading to that result we’re looking for, and then no, we don’t need it.
Robert: You could save that …
Brian: And save time.
Robert: We could spare it.
Brian: That’s exactly right.
Robert: All right, on that really terrible note of dating myself of ten kilobytes being a lot, that is enough time. Brian, thank you so much again for joining us. Please reach out if you have any questions, all the contact details is below and stay tuned for our next episode. Until then, have a great rest of your day.
And there we go! Now that you know what good BI looks like, it’s time to start crunching the numbers and produce data reports that supports your business strategy. Check out the first few episodes of Late Night Brew’s Business Intelligence series if you missed them. Feel free to download our Empower Your Decisions: Mastering Business Intelligence with Power BI ebook as well for a more comprehensive guide on business intelligence.
Don’t know where to start with business intelligence? Feel free to check out our Microsoft Power BI consulting services or contact us today.
