Kevin is an accomplished sales professional with 20 years of experience driving revenue and building client relationships. Over the past decade, Kevin has specialized in selling complex software platforms across diverse industries, delivering tailored solutions to meet organizational needs. Passionate about helping businesses grow, innovate, and achieve success, Kevin combines strategic insight with a customer-centric approach to create impactful results.
With business leaders striving to cultivate more data-driven organizational cultures, the market for self-service BI is expanding rapidly. By eliminating barriers to data access and analysis, self-service BI tools enable stakeholders across the organization to make more timely and impactful decisions. But democratizing company data, while maintaining the integrity of crucial records and files, requires more than an investment in BI software.
When they aren't accompanied by stringent governance policies, self-service BI solutions can lead to discrepancies in data interpretations, undermining efforts to establish a single source of truth within the organization. Further, unchecked data access can put sensitive information at risk, leading to security breaches, data misuse, and regulatory noncompliance.
A comprehensive strategy that incorporates both technological safeguards and employee education is crucial for ensuring that data is used safely and in a way that benefits the organization as a whole. Developing such a strategy often requires business leaders to collaborate with stakeholders in multiple departments to establish clear, unified goals for their BI software adoptions.
User training and education
Though data-driven organizations report greater profitability than their competitors, studies show that only about 30% of enterprise data is ever leveraged. By improving company-wide access to analytics tools, self-service BI supports an expansion of applications for the information businesses collect. However, businesses that fail to introduce employee training programs alongside self-service BI solutions may face threats to data security and integrity.
Education on the safe and effective deployment of BI software helps employees identify and capitalize on appropriate opportunities for data usage. Meanwhile, data literacy training makes it easier for stakeholders to consistently apply established standards to their analyses, minimizing discrepancies in data interpretation.
Crucially, training programs can also be used to provide clarity around organizational policies for data governance and security. In addition to protecting key information, this helps instill a greater sense of confidence in employees, ultimately encouraging buy-in for vetted BI tools and reducing reliance on unsanctioned applications.
Whether organizations educate employees on BI governance using webinars, in-person programs, or online courses, it's important to also maintain a knowledge base, where teams can refer to established guidelines and best practices for data usage and protection. Maintaining this information in a structured, highly-accessible format can improve transparency around organizational standards, bringing greater consistency to org-wide data processes.
Access controls and monitoring
Once organizational policies have been established, business leaders can promote adherence by implementing software solutions that allow for tighter control over data usage. Analytics tools that offer data versioning and audit logs, for instance, make it easier for team leaders to identify deviations in protocol and address them with relevant stakeholders. Meanwhile, access controls ensure that only relevant users can view and manipulate information freely, reducing the risks of data misuse and limiting the need for managerial intervention.
To prevent external tampering or mishandling of private data, organizations may consider adopting analytics platforms with embeddable AI. These platforms empower employees to prep and consolidate data, create visualizations, generate reports, and perform other high-value tasks within a single application. Providing these capabilities in a unified, IT-vetted location eliminates the need to share data with third-party vendors to obtain essential insights, and can deter employees from seeking their own, unsanctioned solutions for analysis. In this way, embeddable AI improves data privacy within the organization, and can lead to more consistent compliance with both industry and regional regulations.
Analytical transparency
Whether an organization strives to improve CX, bring greater efficiency to its operations, or achieve any number of big-picture goals, clear and consistent interpretations of company data are essential. Organizational leaders should encourage employees to be transparent about their analytical methodologies and communicative about their findings. This helps to unify stakeholders in their approach to meeting benchmarks and KPIs established by the organization.
High visibility for maximum impact
Zoho Analytics improves decision-making at every level of the organization by empowering stakeholders to prep and blend cross-platform data, augment their analyses with AI and ML, and share live reports and dashboards with key stakeholders.
When insights become siloed within a team or department, it is often difficult to identify conflicts in the way data is interpreted and prevent misalignment of stakeholder actions and messaging. For instance, a support team may find that a new product upgrade has been poorly received by the company's highest-paying customers. But if the sales team overlooks this data, or interprets it differently, they may continue promoting an unpopular upgrade to high-value leads.
Unfortunately, 80% of organizations report that at least some of their teams maintain individual systems for managing, sourcing, and consuming data. Inevitably, this results in flawed or inconsistent business decisions and can diminish ROI in BI software. To keep the actions of stakeholders aligned—and beneficial to the broader organization— proactive business leaders often invest in tools that improve cross-functional communication and visibility, and establish procedures for addressing analytical discrepancies.
Ongoing communication
When data is shared and manipulated by a range of users, the swift identification of errors in both the data itself, and the way it is interpreted, becomes crucial. If employees are able to quickly report issues to IT teams or organizational leadership, they can prevent a small problem from escalating in a way that impacts critical business decisions. This means that open lines of communication between departments will play a vital role in the performance of self-service BI solutions.
Encouraging employees to explore their new software solutions, take advantage of SMEs, and ask question whenever they arise can help keep BI issues from being overlooked—or addressed through less effective ad-hoc remedies. Ultimately, the more efforts an organization makes to keep its employees connected, the better equipped it will be to reduce the risks—and increase the rewards—that come with putting data in the hands of stakeholders.
If you're interested in an intuitive BI solution that improves org-wide visibility of crucial business data, I encourage you to explore Zoho Analytics. With Analytics, you can create self-service BI portals where users can run AI-powered analyses, create comprehensive visualizations, and tap into valuable data collected across the organization.