Business Intelligence Strategy

Business Intelligence is a business management term which refers to applications and technologies which are used to gather, provide access to, and analyse data and information about an organisation’s operations.

It is used to improve the timeliness and quality of information and enable managers to better under- stand their business through consistent and information based business decisions. Having access to timely and accurate information is an important resource for an organisation as it can expedite de- cision-making.

BI systems can also be designed to provide man- agers with in depth knowledge about the internal operations of the organisation.

Business Intelligence Strategy

Without a BI Strategy, BI solutions are ad-hoc in response to specific user requirements and with little or no attention paid to projects in other ar- eas. As a result, in most cases the full potential of the BI solution is not utilised or realised.

For the full benefit of BI to be reached, it is crucial for a strategy to be implemented. The strategy should include the following:

• Building trust between the Business Users and IT. As BI sits in the middle of the business and IT, the successful implemen- tation of a BI Strategy can be hindered by any history of mistrust within the organisa- tion;
• Defining the Business Intelligence vision for the organisation, setting standards / meth- odologies, specifying the technology, priori- tising projects and developing user skills. For example, setting up a Business Intelli- gence Competency Centre (BICC) or Pro- gram Management Office (PMO) which will create and maintain standards / method- ologies etc, and then monitor and direct projects to address BI needs;
• Ensuring that BI initiatives can be mapped to the technical, functional, organisational and business needs of the organisation.

There will be some areas of the BI Strategy that can be documented in depth whilst other elements can only be documented at a high level. The BI Strategy document is a ‘living’ document and as such, will continuously be updated as the organi- sation evolves and embarks on new projects and more detail is required. For example, consider that we know data mining will be required in the future. We will need to establish the standards for its use. However, without the additional informa- tion about the mining tool or technology required we can only document the standards at a high level. Once the need arises and the technology has been decided, we can then update the BI Strategy Document to reflect this.