Surveys performed each year clearly show that business intelligence (BI) is a top priority year after year, and almost every company invests in some sort of BI initiative. But why are there very few saying that their BI program was a huge success and dramatically improved the performance of their company?

Many organizations have data warehouses which integrate operational systems into one place and, and they produce some reports from them. Although they may have differing degrees of maturity, organizations have the right to claim that they have the BI systems in place. But there is a big difference between having a data warehouse that is obviously disconnected from the decision making process and having a BI program that is integrated into all aspects of the business and decision making process.

Is it IT Intelligence Strategy?

I happened to see a podcast from Gartner about how to create a BI strategy, which basically says that an organization’s BI strategy is simply a technical document written by IT for IT, and about IT. IT functions just give this document to their business audience saying that it is the BI strategy going forward.

This document includes a list of architectural diagrams showing which data warehouse platform will be used, which BI reporting tool will be used, which ETL tool will be used to get the source data loaded into data warehouse, which analytical applications will be used to create predictive models or which EPM (enterprise performance management) tool will maintain the budgeting and planning process. This document also includes list of strategic vendors to be used by the company.

This is a very good document that could be used to define enterprise BI architecture, but this is definitely not a BI strategy. This document does not communicate anything valuable to the business.

Business Intelligence for Business

As the name implies, business intelligence is for business, which means that a BI strategy should be adopted by business stakeholders. Stakeholders need to have a good understanding of what the purpose of the BI strategy or program is. To build this common understanding, the first thing to do is take their needs into account at the very beginning. Go to them and ask what it is that business would like to achieve with the BI initiative or program. And then create a strategy document that describes all these objectives and aspects with no reference to any technical consideration.

If you don’t really get any alignment with the business, you never get any value from any BI initiative, which is why many organizations cannot clearly see any improvement on the performance of their company. If there is no alignment, there will be no benefits.

By addressing these questions in plain language, BI leaders can promote understanding of business intelligence and persuade business users to adopt business intelligence – and in some cases become leaders of business intelligence.

Components of Business Intelligence Strategy

Gartner identifies 3 main components of a well established BI strategy.

WHO: This is simply an area where you define who will have which roles in building and consuming these BI initiatives. It includes defining organizational and individual roles and combines the IT and businesspeople together. This where the BI competency center (BICC) comes into play – a team of individuals with different skill sets ranging from technical and analytical to business skills.

WHAT: The second is identifying the role of BI in an organization. What are you trying to achieve with the BI program? Do you want to achieve a single repository across the organization or do you want to build company-wide metrics or KPIs (key performance indicators) that can be used to measure and drive company-wide strategy, or do you want to reach the point where you build decisioning engines to help identify some patterns and take some actions based on those patterns?

HOW: This is the area where technical architectural document plays a role identifying how to achieve those objectives.

Conclusion

Many organizations have talented BI resources who could build a very well designed BI architecture. And it is obvious that it is not the technical competency that fails in building the BI strategy, but the leadership within the organization.

Without appropriate BI strategy which covers enterprise-wide aspects and promotes a culture that support business intelligence to make better decisions, BI programs will not pay off and will be seen only as technically successful.

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