Business Intelligence For Dummies®

Chapter 10. Taking a Closer Look at BI Strategy

This chapter drills farther into business intelligence strategy. Before you start making specific plans for your solution, however, take a quick, hard look at certain realities that will become very important during the implementation. (This chapter helps with that step, too.)

The Big Picture

The first part of your second look at BI strategy (as shown in Figure 10-1) includes a more detailed examination of the BI capabilities you already have (versus desired capabilities). The goal here is to collect information about your organization's current BI capabilities, assess its current BI needs, and chart a way forward to the next step: creating a roadmap, project plan, and requirements documentation. From there, you can begin building the project.

Figure 10-1. BI strategy: gathering ideas and information to shape implementation decisions.

Your Current BI Capabilities (or Lack Thereof)

Traditional strategic planning begins with a (usually long) analysis-and-planning phase: Leadership assesses a company's current situation, defines the finish line far over the horizon, and then goes through the long laborious process of developing the route to get from here to there.

A BI implementation is no different: To know what's needed, you have to understand what's currently in place.

How you approach this assessment depends largely on the shape of the organization, ...