Getting Your Priorities Straight: Five MUCH Better Ways to Deploy BI

You've finally made the leap into the world of BI. Your organization is on board and they're sold on the benefits the industry has been preaching forever.

You did all your research on BI vendors, and you've compared what they offer against your key objectives. You're looking for self-service reporting and analysis, users working independently of IT, analytics aligned with strategic goals and being able to use a performance management application across your entire organization.

That doesn't seem like too much to ask for - all of this sounds pretty standard, right?

So where do we go from here?

This article addresses a few of the key priorities your organization should have on its radar as you approach your BI deployment. It should help you internalize a few crucial lessons in a way that'll garner maximum returns and minimum risks.

Understanding the circumstances

The definition of business intelligence seems relatively simple. In its basic form, BI entails gathering transactional data from one or multiple sources and using it to provide a model that business people can reference to obtain a better understanding of their operations. However, this may also require a range of highly skilled technical resources, a deep understanding of the source data, an understanding of the business requirements, and most importantly, an ability to perform this in a timeframe that's acceptable to the business and its major stakeholders.

Organizations that have implemented or are considering implementing a business intelligence solution to support their Dynamics implementation experience a number of challenges, some of which ...