Effective Questioning in Business Intelligence

The Role of Questions in Business Intelligence

Questions play a central role in Business Intelligence as they determine the process of data collection, analysis, and decision-making. Here are some key aspects highlighting the role of questions in BI:

• Data Collection and Understanding: Questions help clarify the scope and type of data needed. They enable companies to determine which data sources to utilize to gain specific insights.
• Problem Identification and Goal Setting: Questions help identify challenges and opportunities, forming the basis of BI initiatives. They assist in setting clear objectives and expectations.
• Data Modeling and Preparation: Questions aid in developing data models and preparing data. They help select relevant data sources, filter, clean, and transform data to conduct meaningful analyses.
• Exploration and Analysis: BI systems allow questions to be directed at data to gain insights. Analysts and decision-makers can formulate ad-hoc questions using BI tools to identify trends, patterns, and correlations in the data.
• Insight Generation: The right questions lead to valuable insights, enabling companies to evaluate performance, make informed decisions, and identify optimization opportunities.
• Reporting and Communication: Questions support report and dashboard development. They enable the presentation of relevant metrics and information in an understandable format, allowing decision-makers to interpret data easily.
• Feedback Loops: Questions generated after analysis can raise additional questions, further driving the BI process. This leads to continuous improvement and adaptation.
• Support for Data-Driven Decision-Making: Questions are the tools for making data-driven decisions. They help test hypotheses, validate business strategies, and derive actions to improve business outcomes.
• Adaptation to Changing Requirements: In a constantly evolving business environment, questions enable BI initiatives to adapt to new demands. Companies can adjust their questions to the changing landscape to remain relevant.
• Data Quality Analysis: Questions form the basis for evaluating the quality of existing data. The higher the quality of the available data (including its collection), the more meaningful the analyses and evaluations in Business Intelligence.

In summary, the right questions can influence the entire BI lifecycle, from planning and data collection to analysis and strategic decision-making. They are the means to transform raw data into valuable insights, enhancing a company’s competitiveness. Therefore, asking the right questions is an essential component of successful BI implementations.

Crucial Questions in Business Intelligence

In the world of Business Intelligence, there are different types of questions you can ask to extract essential information and support business decisions. These questions can broadly be categorized into two types: exploratory questions and confirmatory questions.

1. Exploratory Questions:

Exploratory questions are often asked when seeking new insights, identifying patterns, or recognizing trends. They help explore data and discover new ways to optimize business. Here are some examples of exploratory questions in BI:

• What trends are noticeable in last year’s sales figures?
• Are there seasonal fluctuations in customer orders?
• Which factors influence customer satisfaction?
• Are there undiscovered patterns in our customers’ purchasing behavior?

Exploratory questions are often open-ended, requiring broad answers. They are ideal for discovering new insights and potential in your data.

2. Confirmatory Questions:

Confirmatory questions are asked to validate existing hypotheses or ensure specific assumptions or speculations are correct. These questions aim to validate data analysis. Here are some examples of confirmatory questions in BI:

• Does the data confirm that our marketing campaign boosted sales?
• Has customer satisfaction increased after implementing our new support system?
• Have production costs decreased in the last six months as expected?
• Do sales forecasts align with actual sales figures?

Confirmatory questions are often closed-ended, aiming to verify existing assumptions and ensure data consistency.
Finding the right balance between exploratory and confirmatory questions is crucial. While exploratory questions provide new insights and encourage creative solutions, confirmatory questions help ensure the accuracy of the analysis and verify data reliability.
The choice of the right question type depends on the specific goals of your BI analysis and the phase of the analytical process. Often, analysis starts with exploratory questions to generate new ideas and then transitions to confirmatory questions to validate and confirm these ideas.

How to Ask the Right Questions

Asking the right questions can be a complex challenge. However, you can follow these points as a guide:

1. Clear Definition of Goals and Purposes:

The first and crucial step in asking the right questions in Business Intelligence is to define clear goals and purposes. This is best done before investing in a BI solution. Before selecting data sources and analyses, ensure you have a comprehensive view and clarity about what you want to achieve with the BI solution. Strong alignment with business goals ensures that the questions asked are meaningful and practical.

2. Identification of Relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs):

The next step in questioning is identifying Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that can contribute to answering the questions. KPIs are metrics used to measure a company’s performance and success. Identifying these specific metrics, regularly updating and monitoring them, can help understand how your business is performing and where optimization potential exists. Moreover, the available metrics also determine the questions you can ask. If the necessary metrics to answer a question are unavailable, it is not practical to ask that question unless you obtain the required metrics first.

3. Focus on Critical Questions:

There is no limit to the number of questions that can be asked in Business Intelligence. Hence, it is crucial to ensure that the questions asked are the most relevant and essential. A proven approach is to focus on the business area that would benefit the most from the insights and formulate critical questions that assist the company in making better decisions.

4. Testing Hypotheses with Data:

BI often provides the opportunity to test assumptions. Instead of relying on conjectures or intuition, rely on data to check if a hypothesis is true or false. This helps in understanding your company or its field of business better.

5. Promotion of a Data-Driven Decision-Making Culture:

Effective use of Business Intelligence leads to a better understanding of what is happening in the company. This, in turn, leads to well-founded and data-driven decisions by teams and executives. Establishing a culture that prioritizes and supports data-driven decisions is beneficial. Employees should be well-trained and equipped with appropriate tools to rely on data.

Best Practices

Learning to ask the right questions requires practice and conscious effort. Here are some steps and tips to develop this skill:

• Understand Your Goal: Before asking questions, be clear about what you want to achieve by answering your question. Understanding your goals helps in formulating targeted questions.
• Learn from the Best: Don’t hesitate to learn from your colleagues or from books and journals about how to ask the best questions. This can help you enhance your skills.
• Ask “Why” and “How”: Open-ended questions starting with “Why” and “How” encourage deeper and more informative answers. For example: “Why did our sales figures decrease last quarter?” or “How can we optimize our marketing strategy?”
• Understand Responses: Often, answers to a question lead to follow-up questions. Therefore, try to understand why a specific result is the answer to your question and develop further questions based on it.
• Understand the Context: Consider the context in which you are asking questions. What information is already available? What data is accessible? Since you can only ask questions that can be answered with existing data, the context influences your questions.
• Build on Prior Knowledge: Utilize your prior knowledge about the topic to ask informed questions. The more you know about the topic, such as being well-versed in the relevant metrics for a question, the better you can develop relevant and in-depth questions.
• Test and Learn: Ask questions and assess how well they provide the desired information. Learn from your experiences and adapt based on them in the future.
• Practice Regularly: Asking the right questions is a skill that can be improved through regular practice. Take the time to consciously develop and ask questions.
• Seek Feedback: Also, ask colleagues or supervisors for feedback on your questions. They can provide valuable insights and help you enhance your questioning technique.
• Be Patient: Learning to ask the right questions takes time and patience. Do not give up and stay motivated to develop this important skill.

Advantages of Asking the Right Questions

In the context of BI, especially when utilizing self-service BI tools, asking the right questions is pivotal. Incorrect queries can lead to wasted time exploring data fruitlessly or making decisions based on flawed analyses. Incorrect queries result in time, resource, and energy wastage. However, asking the right questions holds various vital advantages:

• Precise Decision-making: Right questions enable precise and informed decisions, extracting relevant insights from vast datasets. They help extract relevant information from large amounts of data and turn the data into valuable insights.
• Efficient Resource Utilization: Asking the right questions aids in the efficient use of time and resources, preventing wastage on data analysis irrelevant to business goals.
• Identifying opportunities and challenges: Opportunities and challenges can also be easily identified thanks to the right questions. This facilitates the identification of trends, patterns, and issues that might remain hidden otherwise.
• Optimizing Business Processes: The right questions help optimize business processes, identify bottlenecks, enhance efficiency, and improve customer satisfaction.
• Competitive Edge: Companies adept at asking the right questions have a competitive advantage. They comprehend changing market conditions swiftly and adjust accordingly.
• Error Avoidance: Asking the right questions mitigates errors and false assumptions, fostering a data-driven decision culture based on objective information rather than conjectures.
• Customer Orientation: Right questions enable understanding customer needs better, enhancing customer focus and allowing tailored solutions.
• Continuous Improvement: Right questions drive continuous improvement, enabling businesses to enhance performance and adapt to shifting market conditions through BI tools and accurate questioning.

Challenges in BI Questioning

• Lack of Clarity: Unclear queries often stem from decision-makers lack of clarity, leading to analysis of incorrect data and unreliable results. This lack can lead to financial losses, dissatisfied customers, and reputational damage. To avoid this, decision makers should ensure that they formulate clear and concise questions based on concrete problems or challenges.
  Establishing a clear process for formulating BI questions is crucial. To do this, decision makers can work closely with the teams involved to ensure that questions are based on actual business needs. Training and education programs can also help promote understanding of the importance of clear questions.
• Data Quality: Incorrect questions can arise even if the data quality is insufficient. Even with correct queries, inaccurate or incomplete data can lead to erroneous conclusions. Thoroughly vet your data sources to ensure high-quality information is used.
• Lack of communication: Another difficulty associated with asking the wrong questions in business intelligence is a lack of communication. Often, managers and employees in different departments have different views of the same data. Therefore, it is important to ensure that all stakeholders have the same understanding of the data and that they share the same goal and priorities. Effective communication within the organization is therefore essential to ensure that the data provided is meaningful. Regular meetings where teams share their perspectives on data can prevent misunderstandings. It is also important to establish clear communication channels and responsibilities for data analysis.
• Unsuitable BI Tools: Inadequate tools can result in incorrect questions. If your company is using outdated software that does not meet specific requirements, the wrong questions may be asked. One solution to this is to deploy new BI tools that are tailored to the specific needs of your business and your data. Regular evaluation of the software’s relevance to the company’s needs is essential.
• Outdated Methods: Holding on to outdated methods might lead to irrelevant questions. Thus, new methods may allow you to ask different questions than older methods did and allow you to use your data more effectively. At the same time, your business may simply have evolved and previous questions are no longer relevant. Continuous evaluation of the relevance of questions and staying abreast of the latest data collection and analysis trends is crucial.

Examples of Right Questions

Here are some exemplary questions that can be answered using Business Intelligence Software:

1. Sales / Marketing:

• Which products are top sellers? Which ones should be removed from the inventory?
• Are there seasonal trends in sales figures that need to be considered in inventory planning?
• How do advertising campaigns influence customer demand and revenue?

2. Financial Services:

• Which customer groups pose the highest risk of loan defaults, and how can we minimise these risks?
• How are interest rates evolving, and how will this affect our investment strategy?
• How can we detect fraudulent transactions in real time?

3. Production and Manufacturing:

• How can we optimise production capacity to enhance efficiency?
• What is the optimal maintenance schedule for machines or equipment to minimise downtime?
• How can we reduce energy consumption in production to cut costs?

4. Logistics and Supply Chain Management:

• How can we reduce supply chain costs while increasing reliability?
• Which suppliers exhibit the best delivery performance, and how can we optimise our procurement strategy?
• How can we reduce inventory levels to release capital without jeopardising delivery capabilities?

Conclusion

In Business Intelligence, asking the right questions is pivotal to enabling data-driven decisions. Incorrect queries can lead to unreliable analyses and consequently, faulty decisions. Therefore, it is crucial to contemplate the questions you want the system to answer and the data required before procuring a Business Intelligence Software.

A robust BI tool like myPARM BI^act comes with pre-built dashboards, easing the process of formulating the right questions during implementation. Additionally, at Parm AG, we are ready to assist in creating new dashboards, leveraging our expertise to help you pose the right questions and connect them with the necessary data for answers. We are also available for training sessions, aiding you in optimising myPARM BI^act and aligning the software with your needs and questions.

Would you like to get to know myPARM BI^act in a demo presentation? Then make an appointment with us right away!