What is a Business Intelligence Vision?

Business intelligence is a set of techniques and methodologies that helps an organization make faster, more profitable decisions. What that means to your organization is defined from your BI Vision. So what is a BI Vision? – it is a short description that clearly defines what BI will deliver to you. It is the first step in developing your BI Strategy.

It might be:

"BI will provide a tighter connection between our strategy and operations thereby helping us be more productive and more profitable".

OR

"BI will deliver greater insight to our decision makers, enabling them to make decisions faster, and in a way that adds more value to our business".

Your vision then defines the bones of your BI strategy – the best combination of techniques and technologies to meet the business intelligence [BI] vision of any one organization. Each organization has a different focus for both their BI vision and their BI strategy – this is because no one organization has the exact same corporate goals as another, or is in the same ‘current state’. In some businesses, their strategic execution, how well their operational processes deliver to their strategic goals may be very good. However, their strategy may be weak, in that it is not gaining in market share or market growth in some specific area. In this case, BI may be focused on finding new market opportunities that further leverage their operational excellence.

BI is for just about everyone. And it needs to be understood and embraced by everyone in an organization as a means to enhance human performance rather than replace it. The ability to deliver consistent, timely information in a format the supports corporate performance requires a conscious blending of traditional and non-traditional methodologies and technology. However, it is important that the technology does not overshadow the rationale behind the business desire for business intelligence capability.

BI is a combination of People-Process-Technology that can add value to over 90% of the enterprise. BI is an enterprise wide ‘system’ that makes use of timely, trusted data to support performance management and decision making. This has a 90% people and process component.

Documenting the BI Vision

The BI vision is documented in a BI Strategy document to ensure that implementation of specific technology or a data structure remains focused on the BI objectives for a particular organisation. A good starting point to help define your BI Vision and objectives is to understand:

• BI Drivers - what is propelling you to adopt a BI Culture
• BI Constraints - where are the tough spots, or barriers, that need to be overcome for the strategy to be achieved in full.

Gail La Grouw is a strategic performance consultant, speaker and author at Coded Vision. This article is a condensed exerpt from The Business Intelligence Guide. Click here to get step-by-step details on how to succesfully Develop a BI Vision.

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Implementing the BI Vision

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