Democratising Business Intelligence

JJ Aiston, Director, Group Business Intelligence, Paysafe

JJ Aiston, Director, Group Business Intelligence, Paysafe

One of the main challenges facing the business intelligence community today is how we rise to meet the increasing demands of our internal customers. Consumers live in a world where, thanks to the smartphone, we expect any information we want to be available instantly, regardless of time of day or location, in any format and on any device. Those expectations, not unreasonably, carry over into the workplace. But how can we balance these demands against the realities of a robust, enterprise-grade data environment?

There are two main considerations when looking to address this. These are (i) security and (ii) correctly addressing what our internal customers are trying to understand.

In the payments industry, security is fundamental to our day-to-day operations. Effective security includes segregation of data and restricted user access, but these can both present challenges in opening up a business intelligence environment to a wider audience. The best way to address this is by focusing on what users really need.

For example, do our internal customers really need transaction-level data in order to drive decision making? Often this level of data contains sensitive information which is subject to the highest level of security, so can be difficult to share.

Our internal customers come to us for intelligence about the business (hence the name of our art), not big data dumps. They want the core message. So, by understanding what information they need to take from the data (for example, performance by sales team or regional office), we can aggregate to that level. If this aggregation can also strip out sensitive data that doesn’t contribute to the decision-making process, we can enable exposure of this aggregated information to our audience at a less-restricted level of the security environment.

it’s also worth considering investing in educating our audience in new ways of consuming data

It’s also important to consider the skill levels of your end customers and the resources they have. For example, if you are developing for the C-suite, will they always have time to apply filters to a Tableau workbook in between board meetings to get what they want? Do they have access to Alteryx or Power BI? There is no single answer here, so you need to take care to understand this for your audience. In some cases, they will want to invest the time into drilling into the data themselves to understand multiple scenarios on the fly. This could be just in Excel or through their own SQL queries. In some cases, they will want a simple email that gives them a “YES” or “NO” decision, nothing more.

It’s also worth considering investing in educating our audience in new ways of consuming data. It’s surprising how many people outside of the data community consider Excel to be the only way to do that. However, a thoughtful, simple, server-based data visualisation can be a much better way of helping people access and understand the information your data is producing.

These different solutions usually require the same amount of rigour, but with a different approach. Making sure you understand this from the outset brings two benefits. Firstly, it means that your efforts will be focused on the right solution for your audience. Secondly, and most importantly, it means your efforts will produce information in a format that is useful, accessible and digestible to the customer. That’s how we add value as business intelligence specialists.