Identifying BI Opportunities

When planning a BI program, the change management aspect cannot be underestimated. For many, BI is seen as a technology deployment, in reality, technology only forms 10 % of the implementation. The balance is in integrating BI into operational processes and helping business users adapt to using BI capability to support their activity management and decision making.

The key to a successful BI program rollout is to identify a BI opportunity in a critical part of the business, where the outcome can be measured and the results link directly to meeting a core business objective. Once this first 'high profile' small rollout is successful, it can be used to champion other BI intitiatives within the organisation.

The following guide will help identify the BI opportunities in your organisation.

BI Opportunity Assessment

There are three distinct phases of the BI Opportunty Assessment

1. Defining Business Requirements - assess the value of BI in different parts of the business in terms of users and information needs in terms of measures, dimensions, and level of detail.
2. Developing A BI Blueprint - gaining input from the business on potential BI impact and collating all information gathered from the requirements assessment into a simple blueprint format.
3. Evaluating BI Alternatives - based on the findings of the requirements assessment and outcome of the BI Blueprint, we can assess BI alternatives in terms of their importance and the potential difficulty of implementation.

BI solutions benefit 90% of business users, across most functional areas. It is important therefore, to use a formal method to identify, define and evaluate each BI opportunity.

Business intelligence needs to be used to be understood, making the selection of the first few implementations critical to the overall acceptance by the business of the BI capabilty. A good result displaying impact of empowered employees will boost morale and the desire of other functional areas to implement BI.

NEXT: Defining Business Requirements

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