Failing To Create User Personas
BI solutions require a significant investment, yet they often provide little or no value to the organization because the system does not match user requirements.
In the previous chapter, we have discussed how unrestricted access to information for everyone can be a huge mistake that many businesses have been committing in the age of digital information technology.
Anyone who has ever sat in on a marketing meeting has probably heard talk of “buyer persona.” Marketers understand that they must know their customers inside and out – what drives those customers to buy, what keeps those customers from making buying decisions, what is important to those customers, etc.
When it comes to BI, executives can learn a lot from this exercise. Failing to match a BI system’s capabilities with users’ needs, especially the business user, is one of the biggest mistakes that organizations can make when choosing a solution.
BI solutions require a significant investment, yet they often provide little or no value to the organization because the system does not match user requirements. Thus, you must have the right business intelligence user persona for your BI solution or BI tool of your choice.
For example, a developer will need access to different data types for different reasons than a member of the sales team.
That’s why it is critical to know who the users are, who they should be, and their job requirements for the perfect ideal customer profile.
You must delve deep into how and why each of those personas will access data and for what purpose your team will use data, be it for data analytics on your dashboard or embedded analytics. You must know their skill sets and how “technical” those personas are. It will be important to establish each persona’s reporting needs and capabilities and ensure those capabilities are included in any potential new BI platform.
There are a lot of typical user personas that you can designate for your BI software in every data platform.
- Power users are highly technical employees and data scientists who some might call “data ninjas.” These users want to dive deep into the numbers.
- Hard-core developers are technical employees who want to write their code. These users require a development platform rather than a report generation platform.
- Decision-makers are executives who want a quick snapshot of the numbers that are important to them.
- Business analysts are knowledge workers who require no-fuss access to information. They need specific tidbits of data to perform tasks.
Lastly, check-in users are typically customers, vendors, or partners. These users require easy access to specific information on a sporadic basis.
Our Takeaway
Spending thousands of dollars on high-end, state-of-the-art BI tools and software can be deemed useless if you fail to identify the user personas needed for your BI tools and the environment where the team will use them. It is essential to know their job requirements and establish the different user personas for our convenience. You do not need to spend a fortune to create the best data team for customer retention and actionable insights.
In the next chapter, you will learn how failure to understand data can be fatal to your business.
