You're seeking to elevate your BI insights. How can you effectively incorporate external data sources?

Integrating high-quality external data sources, performing comparative analysis, and applying advanced analytics. This approach enriched our data visualizations and provided a comprehensive view of market dynamics, while ensuring data security and compliance.

First, assess the needs for external sources of data in the model for instance integrating macroeconomic indicators like Inflation and FX rates and their impact on quarterly projections could be a reason. Add their data definitions and rationale to the data glossary/dictionary. Ensure the connection to the live API is secure and if not, we could use a different approach to batch the data in other interim tables. Ensure this data is structured in a way it can easily be integrated say in tabular format, imputation of missing values (forward and backfilling), and aligning dates and data types, etc. Perform key statistical tests like multicollinearity to reduce confidence interval deviation. Then you can apply them effectively in your models.

To effectively incorporate external data sources and elevate your BI insights, start by identifying sources that complement your internal data and align with your business objectives. Assess the quality, accuracy, and reliability of the external data to ensure it meets your standards. Integrate and cleanse this data using ETL processes to maintain consistency within your BI systems. Leverage the enriched data to create more comprehensive analyses, revealing trends, benchmarks, and insights that were previously inaccessible. Finally, continuously monitor the performance of these data sources to ensure ongoing relevance and accuracy in your insights.