IDs: You’re already doing business intelligence work
Instructional Designers, if you’ve ever found yourself thinking, ‘Why isn’t anyone else seeing this issue?’ it’s probably because no one else is.
Not because others aren’t paying attention, it’s simply that most aren’t positioned like you are. You spend your days talking to people across departments, uncovering what they actually need to succeed.
You’re already doing business intelligence work.
In parts I and II in this series, we looked at why IDs belong in BI and how managers can help bring them into the conversation.
IDs, this is your playbook for making it happen. If you’re not familiar with the term, Business Intelligence (BI) is the practice of collecting and analyzing data to drive business decisions – think dashboards and KPI tracking. But here’s what traditional BI often misses:
Behind every metric is a human behavior, and behind every behavior is a reason.
That’s where you come in.
Many companies don’t have formal BI teams, and even those that do rarely include someone with your cross-organizational visibility. That’s why this article is for you. We will show you how to:
- Recognize the strategic insights you’re already surfacing.
- Frame them in a way that resonates with leadership.
- Position yourself as a valuable contributor to BI and strategic planning.
Here goes!
Your Insights Are BI Gold
As an ID, people may see you as the “training person.” But you’re actually a translator of operations, a pattern spotter, and a human feedback loop. While BI teams analyze numbers, you’re having conversations with employees, managers, and SMEs; hearing the unfiltered reality of how work actually gets done.
You know why adoption rates are low, spot process breakdowns during stakeholder interviews, and identify why that rollout failed. You’re already doing business intelligence work, it’s just getting buried in training deliverables instead of informing strategy.
That’s the missed opportunity, and your competitive advantage. While BI teams have numbers, you have the story behind them, context. While they can tell what’s happening, you understand why. Organizations that combine these perspectives avoid costly mistakes and move faster than their competition.”
This isn’t about adding to your workload, it’s about elevating your existing work you’re already doing.
How to Spot Strategic Insight in Your Work
You know the key to Instructional Design is all about perspective. The key to moving from tactical to strategic is seeing your findings through a business lens. Many of your day-to-day activities have strategic value. The trick is learning to identify which insights could inform decisions far beyond training.
Here are some signs you’ve uncovered something with strategic value:
- Cross-team patterns: If multiple departments mention the same challenge, that indicates an organizational breakdown.
- Shadow processes: When people invent workarounds, that’s operational risk leadership needs to address.
- Post-training confusion: If teams have persistent struggles after training, it’s likely an upstream systems problem.
- Expectations misalignment: When departments define “success” differently, you’ve uncovered a situation that affects collaboration and performance.
These are insights that, with the right perspective, could help your company make better decisions about where to invest time, energy, and resources. Understanding the business value of what you’re already discovering is business intelligence work.
How to Talk to Leadership
Having these insights, it’s time to translate them in a way leadership sees their business value.
Leaders respond to the bottom-line impact, which means reframing your findings to business outcomes:
Efficiency Gains
Risk Mitigation
Competitive Advantage
Here’s a PDF with more details (no email needed).
Leadership needs the right mix of data and context in order to act. Position yourself as an early warning system, packaging what you know in a way that signals how it helps inform better business decisions.
From the “Training Person” to Strategic Partner
There’s a passage in Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being that reads:
“Living life as an artist is a practice. You are either engaging in the practice or you’re not.”
He’s basically saying stop making excuses and start being who you want to be. Now is the time.
Instructional Design is no different, so here are three simple moves you can make to shift from “the training person” to strategic business partner:
3 Low-Lift Moves
- Document Patterns: Look for themes within the feedback you gather and the conversations you have. Note any cross-department friction points that keep popping up.
- Create a One-Pager: A concise, monthly (or quarterly) snapshot of your top 3 insights with their business impact and recommended actions.
- Request Strategic Access: Sit in on the next strategy session and listen for topics and comments that align with what you’re seeing.
These moves don’t require permission, budget, or considerable effort. You’re already collecting business intelligence but now you’re letting leadership know about it and fundamentally changing how they see your role.
Here’s a PDF with more details (no email needed).
Use the Evidence You’ve Already Got
Understanding what you could be doing better is critical for a business. Having the right people in the discussion is a key to success. But you don’t need to wait for an invitation. You already have the evidence leadership needs, you just need to reframe it. As an ID, you’re embedded across teams, collecting insights that analysts and strategists would love to get their hands on.
When you shift your message from “Here’s the training I built,” to “Here’s what I’m seeing, what it means for the business, and what we should do next,” you move from a support role to a strategic partner. And once leadership sees this, they’ll start asking you for your perspective before making decisions.
Your Action Plan:
- Review your last 3 projects: What patterns emerged beyond the training needs? What systemic issues did you uncover?
- Create your first brief: Turn those patterns into 3 bullet points about business impact and recommended actions.
- Test the waters: During your next manager check-in, mention you’ve been tracking patterns that might be relevant to the company/project, and ask them if you can share the brief with them.
There’s no guarantee you’ll see immediate buy-in. But keep at it. You’re signaling to your manager you’re seeing important strategic issues and want to contribute to solutions.
This may be new to them. If at first they don’t get it, don’t lose momentum, refine your approach and try again. The right leaders will recognize what you’re offering.
As an ID, you’re already positioned to be an effective strategic ally. You see what others don’t. Now it’s time to make sure the people making the big decisions see it too.
Thank you!
If you’ve read this 3-part series, I appreciate it and welcome your feedback. We’re at a time when traditional roles are being challenged in the business world, both from within and by external influences – mostly AI, but there’s never been more of an opportunity to take hold of your role and evolve it to where you’d like it to be.
It’ll take time and patience, but if you keep at it and remain open to how your role might change, your career will be rewarding and impactful – isn’t that what we’re all looking for?
Thanks again for reading and please reach out!
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