Navigating the complex world of Business Intelligence (BI) can be daunting, especially when initiating a project. Whether you're establishing a BI checklist, seeking an ideal BI requirements gathering template, or simply striving to grasp the essence of BI requirements, our guide is here to pave the way. Dive deep with us as we untangle the intricacies of BI and equip you with the essential knowledge to fortify your BI journey. Below, our table of contents offers a roadmap to the insights awaiting you.
Table of contents:
❓ 4 Questions to Ask When Identifying Your Business Intelligence Requirements
👍 3 Methods to Gather Your Business Intelligences Requirements
There are five major steps on the BI journey roadmap:
1) Structure
2) Identify
3) Choose
4) Implement
5) Measure
Related:
Power BI, Your Business Intelligence Tool – Features & Benefits
Choosing Microsoft Business Intelligence (BI) tools for analysis and reporting
Each department at your organization has different Business Intelligence requirements and needs. The following four questions can serve as guidelines when you gather your organization’s Business Intelligence requirements:
✅ Q1. What does your business need and want? (Business Assessment)
When you answer this question, consider the past, present, and the future. BI needs to address pains experienced in the past. BI needs to deliver on the current needs. More importantly, BI will scale out to cover future wants.
Related: Business Intelligence for Small Business – Big Data, Too Big to Ignore
✅ Q2. What is your current data suggesting? (Data Assessment)
Data discovery uncovers the data assets in your current environment. It helps you understand what data you have. It can also suggest data-driven requirements to BI.
✅ Q3. How to plan for a bright future? (Technology Assessment)
Technology capability planning allows architects and other visionaries to envision the future and retrospectively plan for a BI solution that leads you there.
✅ Q4. How to make your end users engage more with BI? (User Group Assessment)
Profiling users into user groups can help visualize their consumption and usage patterns. In addition, it ensures a single BI solution is selected to suit the needs of the different groups of customers.
Results: Asking the questions above will help you find the following results:
📊 Address business, data, technical, and usage needs.
⚙️ Address current and future needs. You will be able to take advantage of the “land and expand” approach.
🕐 Save time by gathering these requirements only once. The requirements package will be used in both the selection phase, as well as in the implementation phase.
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During the process of gathering your Business Intelligence requirements, you should consider the following three methods.
As you gather your organization’s Business Intelligence requirements, you will realize a large amount of data is already available and it has a story to tell. It is helpful to get to know your data and understand the gaps and opportunities. This will help leverage the opportunities in the select and implement BI project and spin off side projects to fix some of your current data issues. Data discovery can be broken down into data inventory and data quality.
Are you ready to gather your Business Intelligence requirements? Before you get started, here are two last tips from us:
Don’t focus on what the tool will look like at the beginning. Instead, focus on what your business needs BI to do and the analytics it must be able to support. Don’t use these opportunities to create a long list of requirements; instead, use them to understand the motivations and functional uses; requirements will come naturally after that.
In some situations, your executive team might not have all the answers right away. Help them to focus their thoughts by asking good questions. Since you might not be able to gather all the requirements you need in a single session, give your executive team some time to think through the questions and schedule a follow up meeting to gather the results.
Business Intelligence is no longer a luxury or niche. Organizations of every size and across all industries are taking advantage of the benefits of BI, and, to succeed, your organization will need to follow suit. But having an appetite for BI doesn’t necessarily mean that the initiative will be an automatic success.
ProServeIT’s team of BI experts will be happy to assist you, providing consulting and performing a complimentary live demo of Power BI for you and your team. Contact us to start your journey today.
The manufacturer was fed up with the manual reporting processes they had in place – they were doing a lot of copy-paste from files into Excel, and then manually modifying stuff in Excel.