How to Start a Business Intelligence Project

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Business Intelligence (BI) project assumes to be integrated with Data Warehouse (DWH) or other reporting solution like data repository or reporting from legacy systems. Therefore BI should be considered as DWH/BI project.
Practice shows very low successful implementation of DWH/BI project(different sources vary from 20% to 40%). That’s why it is important to make at least proper start of DWH/BI project, and here are certain preconditions mentioned in steps to minimize risks of Business Intelligence project failure.

Steps

1. Analyze internal requirements. Concentrate on following issues in analysis: have business requirements reached threshold for applying Business Intelligence tools and do current reporting systems fail to supply quality information in time?
2. Secure board member sponsorship. Without solid sponsor in Board Business Intelligence project will have too many problems without proper help from top management.
3. Identify best internal team – key users to be involved into project. Team members should be with IT skills and/or deep business knowledge especially on major legacy systems like ERP, CRM, Billing and similar. Usually they are key legacy system managers.
4. Check financial resources for project. What are limits?
5. Secure team to be dedicated to project. If team members are married and with kids it is a plus. They will hardly leave project in the middle of implementation.
6. Provide internal help for team members. Since they are essential in operative work in legacy systems they will need help and replacement if possible in operative work with standard tasks.
7. Gather requirements from complete company or at least from sales, marketing, finance, technique (production).
8. Analyze, standardize and consolidate requirements. Not all requirements are for implementation especially not from marketing who is huge request generator.
9. Prepare requirement list.
10. Start negotiation with vendors.

Tips

• Don’t forget importance of internal marketing for project. Goals of project should be communicated in simple and clear form. Highlight benefits (project ROI)

Warnings

• Don’t start Business Intelligence project without top management support, support should not be only declarative what happens very often! Don’t start project without strong internal team!

Sources and Citations

• == Sources and Citations ==
• http://www.business-intelligence-secrets.com

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