Business Requirements

What are Business Requirements?

Business requirements—the list of business questions that someone wants to answer as a result of their investment in their analytics tool and team—are a critical component of digital analytics implementations, but they’re often overlooked.

Business requirements are a great conduit between business stakeholders and the analytics team. While business folks often don’t care about tagging or data layers, they do understand business questions. Business requirements help:

  • Developers make sure they are not wasting time tagging things that no one wants
  • Developers better understand why the business wants to know things, which might inform useful suggestions
  • Stakeholders build reports/dashboards to answer specific business questions after the implementation is done
  • Analytics teams show how they are adding value to the organization

Common Challenges

Companies don’t often document business requirements. Although they might have a Solution Design Document that lists all of the data points they’re collecting, this document only details WHAT is being tracked without communicating WHY that tracking matters.

Identifying business requirements is difficult. If you ask stakeholders what questions they want to answer about a website or mobile app, they often can’t articulate it. But really, they shouldn’t have to come up with business questions, because, over the past twenty years, analytics professionals already have asked and answered thousands of business questions across all industry verticals.

Identifying business requirements can be expensive. Digital analytics consultants go from client to client and, to some extent, help them answer the same business questions they have done in the past, which is great money for consultancies, but not great for their clients or the industry.

They’re not generally integrated into platforms. When you buy from analytics vendors like Adobe and Google Analytics, you only get the platform, not a catalog of business questions ready to be answered. You don’t get guidance on what types of questions your organization should answer and how to answer them. We believe this is a missed opportunity.

Apollo’s Different Approach to Business Requirements

Apollo takes a completely different approach. Organizations shouldn’t have to guess about what business questions they could answer. Instead, they should be able to leverage all that has been learned over the past twenty years.

Apollo comes pre-loaded with over 1,000 business requirements (questions) to choose from. These business requirements span all industry verticals and all levels of implementation sophistication.

The Apollo team identified every business question that we (collectively) had ever answered via tools like Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics and documented them in the Apollo platform. This means that Apollo users can take advantage of the experience of many experts and hundreds of past implementations.

What does this mean for your business?

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Ease

This pre-identified business requirement library empowers you to present a list of potential business questions to analytics stakeholders and have them tell you “yes” or “no” for each question, rather than putting them on the spot.
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Potential

Once stakeholders start seeing potential business requirements, it gets their minds turning about other questions they might have. We don’t advocate that Apollo users present all 1,000+ requirements to their users, but rather that they use the provided filtering capabilities to narrow the list down to the 50 or 100 that make the most sense for their organization. If new/custom business requirements are needed, they can be added to Apollo.
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Program Health

Identifying the correct business requirements for your organization allows you to make sure the analytics program is aligned with the needs of the business.
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Efficiency

In Apollo, the identified business requirements drive all other aspects of the analytics implementation, such as the solution architecture, data layer, tagging specifications, data elements, tag management configuration, dashboards, and conversion metrics.

Ready to take a spin around Apollo?