So, you have a great strategy and the business model has been recrafted to incorporate it well. The success of your business strategy is guaranteed, right? No. 

The two most important factors for the success of a strategy are “right team” and “management support”. 

Business strategy, when made in a vacuum, fail to translate into reality. When it incorporates right staff and ascent of upper management, that’s when it begins to percolate down to the lowest denominator. 

A business intelligence team is what you need. This team would become the foundation of company’s intelligence strategy – it needs to be strenuous, capable, and deft. 

So, what constitutes the ‘right team’? 

Business Intelligence Team: 5 Must-Have Expertise

• Business Intelligence Lead

Their role is 75% business and 25% technology. Business Intelligence Leads are usually schooled in business and have a know-how of technological skills. Their role in the team is to generate insights for business improvement and lead a plan for establishment and implementation of the business strategy. 

They are at the helm of strategy unit. Along with mobilizing the team toward a common goal, they also need to keep a line of communication with upper management, keep them in loop and onboard with their plans. It would be ideal for this expertise to come from upper management (if plausible).

• Business Intelligence Developer

It involves developing (designing and creating) data pipelines that can integrate data from multiple sources for the purpose of extraction, transformation and loading data in warehouse. 

The person on this expertise may come from data engineering background. Those who can store and clean data, making it fit for processing, write the code for processing to enable technical development of business solutions 

• Data or Business Analyst

They are experts on data acquisition, processing, and summarizing. The data is eventually used to transform into meaningful insights and develop reports and visualizations. In nutshell, they are the story tellers. 

• Database Administrator

This expertise relates to administration of databases – creating new applications for support and maintenance of other applications used by the team. Database administrator would also be responsible for bringing onboard, protecting and maintaining data and metadata of the organization.

Along with being skilled in application development, people with this expertise also have to be good communicators. 

• Data Scientist

Data Scientists bring machine learning, computer programming, mathematics, statistics, and analytical tools prowess to the table. They design models and work with numbers. Converting data into information. The insights provided by them are analyzed further using BI Lead lens to carve out best course of business strategy. 

Masterfulness in these five areas can be brought to the table by a single person or through multiple sources. Most business strategists have a know-how of all areas but may specialize in some or one. 

IMPORTANT TIP: Keep these two pointers in mind

When you do everything right, and yet the plan fails, the problem can be in the foundation. Business strategies, even though backed by data and best of experts, need to ensure these two things to become a success: 

• Your Business Intelligence team must be full-time people engaged in the process.

Many organizations what they do is split time of existing employees with the tasks they were previously doing, and new business intelligence unit devoted to business strategy. Often so it happens, parallel instructions and expectations lead them to do no good to either party. Furthermore, it also goes to show the non-seriousness of an organization toward Business Intelligence unit. 

Experience has proven that a BI unit must compose of full-time employees dedicated to the task for the strategy to see light of the day and preferably success in the future. 

• Keeping upper management onboard is essential. 

Most strategies go down when it’s the lowest of priorities of the upper management. BI team must ensure proper communication with the management and preferably keep them included in the decision process. 

Along with business arithmetic, successful strategizing is as much about capitalizing on the best skills and skedaddling through the crisis by sometimes making upper management realize the business needs them and a unit especially dedicated to intelligence.