The Levels of Business Intelligence


At a very high level, intelligence about your business data can be divided into three main categories.

Strategic

The strategic level looks at a business from the highest vantage point, which is typically done through a rubric such as the Balanced Scorecard. The idea is to boil down the essence of the business into high level metrics with associated targets. Flexible BI tools will allow these higher level reports to be linked into the next level down, the tactical view.

Tactical

The tactical view helps track the particulars of the strategic view. This might mean an analysis of sales trends over the past year to spot anomalies, or a comparison of shipping costs by route to determine which are the optimal routes. Tactical analysis is typically done by an analyst familiar with data reporting, usually with assistance from the IT department (to extract and query for the relevant data).

Operational

Operational intelligence is as in-the-weeds as it gets. The tools used at this level aren’t usually considered “Business Intelligence” per se. It might be the CRM which alerts a salesperson to a deal in danger or the call center application which gives the agent a complete background on a particular customer. All of this data feeds up into the enterprise data store, which can then be analyzed for anomalies and trends by the tactical analysts.

Long-term, Medium-term and Short-term Decisions

Another way to look at this hierarchy is by the frequency at which decisions are made on the data itself. At the operational level, decisions (albeit small ones) are made all the time.

  • Should this customer receive a refund?

  • Which shipment went missing from our supplier?

Tactical level decisions occur less frequently, usually on a monthly or quarterly basis:

  • Our stores in the Northeast are about to run out of inventory, so we should re-supply them.

  • Last quarter’s sales figures have fallen below our moving average, so we should refocus our sales strategy.

Strategic decisions occur the most infrequently. They might be made at the quarterly meeting or they might be multi-year projects:

  • Should we launch a new business line?

  • Should we devote more resources to our Northeast business division?

What Does All of This Mean for your Dashboard?

Knowing that data can be strategic, tactical or operational can help you design better dashboards.

  1. Since strategic data is used for decisions most infrequently, it's best to keep it out of constant view. So if you have a table which rolls up user acquisition by quarter, try to keep it separated from the more immediately actionable data.

  2. Design your primary dashboard (perhaps the one you project on large screen TVs throughout the office) to display tactical data. This might include weekly registrations, the usage of a newly deployed feature, etc. This data is the real pulse of your business. Chartio lets you easily organize these tactical dashboards by subject. Simply click to "add a dashboard" and start creating visualizations to see your data.

  3. The data that is immediately actionable should be made easily available to those who are responsible for acting on it. The report might be a list of expiring accounts that should be viewed by the inside sales rep or a list of error reports that should be shared with the support manager.

  4. When possible (and without cluttering your dashboard), pair operational tables and data with their tactical view. While the operational data is useful on its own to help in immediate decision support, an analyst trying to understand tactical level trends (a sudden rise in sales, a prolonged dip in support performance) will benefit from the ability to drill down to the data in detail and uncover answers at the operational level. That sudden rise in sales might turn out to be the result of one huge client, rather than a steady rise in medium accounts. Or that dip in support performance might be from one support representative with extremely long average time to resolution. The devil is in the detail when it comes to explaining interesting tactical data.

For additional dashboard best practices, take a look at Dashboard Design Tips