Six Ways to Prove the Business Intelligence Data Matches in Your BI Solution!

Are you struggling or worried that the business intelligence solution you spent money on won’t be utilized fully?  Are your employees resistant to change, or are you hearing rumblings in the break room that your staff is dreading the use of the new tool and might not trust your business intelligence data?

One significant way to make a business intelligence solution successful is to prove the data matches.  Your staff needs to trust that the data in the BI solution matches, again and again and again!  Although BI solutions can provide and point out “statistically relevant” differences, you need your staff to interpret the data in order to have a successful solution.

We have six recommendations to prove the data matches:

1) Create a Reference Document

Maintain a living document that takes the key measures and has two columns. Column A holds how the data is derived from the source system – this should be technical code of some kind that one can use in case of emergency.  Column B holds how the data is derived, retrieved or manifested within the BI tool. These should be technical instructions on how A and B should match.

2) Create Comparison Reports.

Second, create reports that calculate the values from the source system directly and the BI system and show the comparison. These reports can be set on some sort of trigger when values are out of whack, but it’s a useful management checkpoint to have someone quarterly look at these, confirm they have a variance of 0 and to confirm what we all come to expect, “Yep, it’s working.”

To read the next four ways to prove your data matches in your business intelligence solution click here to download the whitepaper!