Making the decision to add to your tech stack is exciting and daunting. Exciting because you’ve identified an area of your business that could be optimized, streamlined, or automated via the right tech solution, but daunting because if you don’t execute correctly your initiative could fall flat.

When it comes to business intelligence (BI), Gartner’s stats indicate that 70%-80% of data initiatives fail due to a reliance on old technology, an overall poor understanding of BI, a bad user experience, and a lack of buy-in and support across the organization.

Thrilling and encouraging statistics if you ask me! ???? When it’s easier to not change due to fear of failure than to change, it’s no wonder the industry is lagging in terms of innovation.

But here we are – you identified your organization’s data gaps, you have a clear understanding of the value of business intelligence and developing an analytically-driven culture, and you chose your BI solution. Now, you need to bring it (figuratively) home and roll it out across the board.

Here are 3 ways to drive BI adoption and avoid becoming another Gartner statistic.

Be Transparent

• Explain the why behind rolling out a new BI platform to help your team understand the rationale for the change and buy into the decision. Showing that everyone from the top down is committed to having data-driven conversations and using unique critical success factors and reports to make strategic decisions is essential for everyone to model behaviors.
  
  
• Sell the “what’s in it for me” to allow your team to take ownership of the initiative. The advantage of a single source of truth is that you gain controlled oversight that empowers your team - people can captain their own ship, but everyone is working off the same data and numbers.
  
  
• Democratize your data so everyone across the organization can access all their data and reports. This allows people to put their own energy into the data, manage their business, and experience the value of having a BI platform.
  
  
  

Celebrate The Wins

• Define incremental wins for operations and executive teams so users can feel the value as soon as they’re using the platform. Our attention spans aren’t wired to wait 18 months for results.
  
  
• Balance giving teams familiar reports with new dashboards and features that help them in their day-to-day. This eases them into a new business intelligence environment with fancy new ways of looking at their business while offering the comfort of what they used to know.
  
  
• Build excitement for seeing results and celebrate the actual wins. Building a successful analytically driven culture means using the data (and rewards) to motivate behaviors that align with everyone’s best interest. Organizations and individual contributors should all win together, as a team.

Adjust As You Go

• Stay focused on the outcome even if it requires some adjustment along the way. When it comes to BI, the end justifies the means. All tech rollouts come with great opportunities for feedback. Listen to your teams and make tweaks as needed to deliver a solution that meets the needs of the business.
  
  
• Adjust what constitutes a “win” to ensure alignment across the organization and to support the critical success factors driving your business and your teams every year.
  
  
• Evolve and grow your platform based on internal needs. Successfully implementing a business intelligence platform allows your teams to make smarter decisions, faster. People now have more time to ask questions and be more curious about their business. With smarter questions come opportunities to evolve your data sets, dashboards, reports, and visualizations. Your platform flexibility will be rewarded tenfold through smarter business decisions.
  
  

Most importantly, remember that people support what they help create. Buy-in is essential to any successful tech implementation, but adoption drives long-term engagement. Ultimately, in the case of a business intelligence solution, adoption and engagement are what lead to increasing your organization’s revenue and capturing market share.

To learn more about leading a successful tech innovation initiative within your organization, register to attend the free Multifamily Insiders Demo Day event and join our multifamily expert panel “Strategy, Evaluation, Implementation: 3 Key Pillars to Successful Tech Innovation.”