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Businesses both large and small know they need to look at their data to help make business decisions. That’s obvious. You don’t have to be intelligent to know you need business intelligence. However, you do need to be intelligent to know exactly how to go about it without wasting valuable time and money. One major point to understand is who you are as an organization so you can understand what BI can do for you. In a blog article called “What You Need to Know About Yourself to Buy BI”, Founder of 5000fish, David Ferguson, highlights 5 important questions your organization should ask before buying business intelligence software.
Below are the 5 questions in summary.
1) What are you hoping to accomplish with a BI solution?
Often times, this coincides with your company’s goals which have been set by your organizations key decision makers and stakeholders and are monitored through a series of key performance indicators. David Ferguson gives some examples, “Maybe it’s to save money. Maybe it’s to drive sales. Maybe it’s to gain efficiencies. Whatever your goal may be, know it before shelling out for a solution.”
2) Who’s going to “own” it?
Someone needs to be accountable for the BI efforts. It should be a well-defined part of a job description. Business intelligence can be very scary for the non-technical business person and it helps the cause to have someone spearheading the BI initiatives.
3) How much time can your organization devote to its BI efforts?
The truth of the matter is that everyone is busy. Everyone is up to their ears in projects and sometimes looking at data can fall off the radar. You can spend a king’s ransom in gold to buy the best solution, but if you don’t have the right person allocating time to it you could just be spinning your wheels.
4) How much money can you devote to your BI initiative?
Fortunately, in this day and age you don’t need to have the budget of a Fortune 500 company to purchase a business intelligence solution. There are tools available to fit any company’s budget.
5) What do you need in terms of support?
David Ferguson states, “Maybe all you need from your BI vendor is software. But maybe you need integration among systems as well. Or maybe you need help with developing your strategy.”
Click here to read the full article from the 5000fish blog site.
