Reference no: EM133870392

Discussion Post: Four Pillars of Business Intelligence

To understand and predict future realities, a business analyst must be savvy in data literacy, data acquisition, governance, knowledge mining, and business implementation. An effective business analyst also understands the big picture and overall goals in deriving an analytics strategy, even if they aren't the one developing the strategy. To gain a holistic view of the organizational issues or goals, business analysts often start with a framework.

In this discussion, we will use the four pillars of BI to begin strategizing how we choose analytics tools. The four pillars to powerful business intelligence are understanding how people, processes, technology, and data move across an organization. Becoming knowledgeable about how the pillars interact within a workplace is critical to understanding business information. This information is needed when choosing the proper tool to enhance or modernize a process or gain new insight into an organizational problem.

To begin, an analyst must be keen on developing competence in the data. This competence is known as data literacy, and it is accomplished by reading, examining, and supporting decisions with data. Next, the analyst determines the scope, quality, and accessibility of data assets through data governance and management. Data governance often entails taking an inventory of data assets, defining business language, identifying the flow of data with and through systems, and managing policies for compliance and data accessibility. In other words, data governance ensures that the data is available to those who need to use it within the business. Finally, the analyst uses data visualization to extract insightful stories to produce knowledge that is useful and practical.

Topic

You are a new business analyst working as a military contractor. You notice that decisions are made but are not guided by data analysis. Additionally, you learn that most of the systems in place are quite antiquated. Equally important, you find that the employees do not have widespread knowledge of the data accessible to them to make informed decisions.

In your original post, answer the following:

1) How can you increase data literacy across the organization and what benefit would this provide?

2) What can you do to augment business practices with data governance and express the importance of this practice?

3) Using the four pillars as your framework, propose an action plan to close the loop on data, decisions and analytics to deliver real-world business value to the contracting company.