Why Data Intelligence is needed in Planning your Business for Year 2015

With your organization depending on data and analytics to take better tactical and strategic business decisions, your 2015 planning needs Data Intelligence to formulate your business strategy with competitive advantage.

Today, formal process with respect to data, analytics and formulating Data Intelligence is not only a requirement but also gives you an competitive edge to deal with and leverage data to make better product, pricing, marketing and sales strategies. Creating a central database with data, analytics and further intelligence effectively add value to drive it forward.

While no two organizational strategies and processes are same, when keeping yours together, these are some of the business and strategic functional processes to be implemented as below

• Website Management: One should have website analysis which includes content, better customer and user experience

• Client Analysis: It captures data from direct marketing analysis, customer insights and CRM

• Business Intelligence (BI): One should have business data to formulate business intelligence, business analysis, data services and data modeling to deal with

• Digital Marketing: This includes online channels for data management like social media, online advertisements, email results, promotion results, etc to formulate data analytics

• Lead Generation: Leads give support to Sales team for generating business. Many companies have now switched to Leads Extracting Data Tools which support the Lead Generation process 

• Sales: Sales include analysis of business revenue, product pricingand promotional decisions which were planned last year and what were their results taking positives and negatives to plan for the coming year’s sales and marketing strategy

• Finance & Operations: It includes producing and consuming organization’s financial data & analytics along with operational data

• IT & Systems: It includes support to larger data stack, including how business processes are integrated within systems

• Vendor Management: It includes vendor performance throughout the year and the overall results yield by them to bring industry insights and an outside perspective

• E-commerce Domain: It includes online product, inventory and pricing strategies with representation across the organization, marketing and sales

• Strategic Plans: It includes top management and senior leadership involvement to support broader organizational goals

• New Initiatives: It includes projects with new websites, new apps, product lines or new pricing initiatives

• Creating New Plans: Creating these new plans includes feasibility, proper research and market recommendations establishing the end goal of where you want your business to be

• Using Data: Before you use this data and create analytics first you need to collect it and transform the same into a usable form. So there may be requirements in all these processes like data management platforms, 3^rd party integration or integrating data analysis solutions

• Organizational Resources: It includes resources, access to time, money and people involved with this strategic and tactical planning process

• Drafting a Budget: Drafting a budget is key to business planning and its success. Now by using automated tools, one can track business expenses, profits, units sold, pricing, costs and the required revenue to keep your business growing

Having the list of resources and budget you can now know how much you have to invest in data, analytics and data intelligence which will assist you to have realistic and achievable plans for short, medium and long term strategies to have business success.

This processes empower your company’s business ecosystem by data driven decision making using data analytical tools.

Next Steps:

If you are already having this as a set process and structure to address data, analytics and data intelligence throughout your organization, then you now must have understood the benefits. However, if you have not yet put this in place as a process, then you still have got some time to make sure this data intelligence implementationas a part of your 2015 business plan.