Everyone should know that BI stands for Business Intelligence and not millions of IT expenses. At the end, the tool isn’t the biggest issue and actually software choice is probably one of the least significant decisions you’ll make. We should all start with the basics by answering these questions:
- What are the objectives of the Dashboards?
- How many dashboards do you need?
- Are these dashboards shared across the enterprise or department?
- Do they share the same KPIs but just different POVs?
- Where are the sources of information? How clean are they? Will you need to join different sources?
- How many users are there?
- To what degree of latency can be tolerated?
- In what availability window do you allow? End of Month? Daily? Real Time?
BI solution has to have source data, if that has to come from database systems then there will have to be a means to extract it, delouse it, and join it up with your other data. If you want this to work correctly you’ll need your organizations IT resources.
If that BI solution depends on a data warehouse or a data mart, I’m assuming you’d like it backed-up, maintained and available over your networks.
Once your BI solution spreads outside the limits of your top decision makers, I’m assuming you’d like some kind of secured access and information filtering.
If you want the BI information available to many locations in your organization, it’ll need hardware, software servers, firewall configurations, support, back-up, maintenance etc.
No one is fond of organizational politics and the effect they can have on what appears to be simple. On the other hand if you want your solutions to work these things will need doing properly. Find an internal sponsor for BI whose dorsal fin is big enough to win you co-operation and assistance rather than obstruction.
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