Oracle® Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Solutions

Chapter 11. Understanding Business Needs

In Chapter 10, we identified understanding business needs and initiatives as fundamental to a successful approach in designing and building a business intelligence and data warehousing solution. For technical people, this step is often a challenge. In this chapter, we'll describe how bad business intelligence deployment strategies can impact the lines of business and we provide some sample questions you can ask in the lines of business to call attention to the need for new solutions. We will also discuss some of the typical drivers of these projects in a variety of business types or verticals, including financial companies, healthcare, manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail, transportation and logistics, energy utility companies, educational institutions, and government agencies.

This chapter is meant to give you some ideas as to where to focus your discovery efforts and how to formulate some of the questions you should be asking. It is not meant to take the place of having such discussions within your organization. Each organization has its own unique set of needs and ranking of importance of those needs. The needs are defined by your business constituents and will drive the prioritization you will use in a staged implementation.

Our discussion of project drivers in different business types in this chapter is based on drivers that are commonly present at the time of publication of this book. These drivers sometimes change over time. ...