Copyright: Mikko Lemola
Business intelligence (BI) is the Holy Grail for business. Done right, it can save time, streamline the process, result in best-in-breed reporting tools and standardize data and performance. However, if done incorrectly, BI can compromise data integrity and freshness and result in bad analysis and, ultimately, bad business decisions.
During a session at the 2015 NMHC OPTECH Conference & Exposition, multifamily executives offered tips from their lessons learned during some first forays into BI.
When it comes to merging BI systems, it’s critical to:
- Ensure senior management is the first one informed in order to gain adoption and understanding.
- Make the data easy to get to all levels of the organization - use the “push” methodology rather than “pull.”
- Provide drill-through summary to underlying metrics.
- Ensure a good awareness of evolving and new reporting tools, making certain that on-site teams understand that daily behaviors tie into the resulting metrics.
- Make the data as visual as possible.
After the systems are merged, the work is hardly over. Executives recommended companies:
- Start to leverage the “clean” historical data across the consolidated portfolio by providing visual historical trends as well as predictive performance.
- Wean yourself off grid-based data.
Enable a toolset that allows for a myriad of filters and scenarios to address the “unknown” factor.