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    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence

    Have you ever deployed a solution or a capability in response to constant end-user demand, only to have it ignored once it was delivered? You gave them what they asked for, so why aren’t they using it? The answer is quite simple. What they say and what they mean are two different things.

    A smart IT professional will ask end users about their requirements, before embarking on the implementation of a business intelligence (BI) application. They will ask questions such as: “What information do you need?” and “How do you want it formatted?” The varying answers they receive seem to indicate that what users really need is flexibility. People will also often say that they need to be able to ask ad hoc questions, because the type of information they require is constantly changing. So, the IT professional interprets these requests for ad hoc and flexibility as a need for a business intelligence tool and a data warehouse.

    However, anyone with extensive experience in business intelligence will tell you that 95 percent of your users have neither the time nor the skill to use a BI tool. In other words, their answers and the IT professional’s interpretation of them are wrong!

    This scenario may seem a bit extreme. But the truth is that users often unknowingly provide incorrect information when expressing their reporting needs. Then, IT mistakenly assumes that users know what they mean when they ask for things like an ad hoc tool.

    Through years of experience working with companies of all types and sizes to design and deploy business intelligence systems, Information Builders has determined that there are six key things you need to know about your users before you roll out related technologies to them. In many cases, discovering these six things will require more than just polling end users. This slideshow highlights the six questions you need to know to provide the right business intelligence capabilities to the right people.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 1

    Click through for six questions from Information Builders that you need to answer before deploying business intelligence capabilities.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 2

    This question should not be posed directly to your users. Many end users have a skewed perception of their level of expertise and most consider themselves savvier than they are. As a rule, if someone is comfortable with Excel’s features, such as creating formulas and sorting data, and they can easily interpret numbers, they are probably also capable of employing a business intelligence solution, such as an ad hoc query tool.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 3

    This critical question, arguably the most important of the five, is often completely neglected. Yet if it is answered realistically, an accurate plan for deployment can be formulated, even without responses to the other four questions.

    In a typical organization, most people need to access information, but very few of them have a lot of time to do it. If your users don’t have a lot of time to spend finding, accessing, and analyzing information, then they don’t require a business intelligence tool.

    How much time someone has to devote to reporting is often related to their role in the organization. For example, executives may have very little time to spend analyzing data, while analysts will have much more time, as analysis is their main job function.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 4

    Have you ever really thought about the questions that people ask? Can they be categorized? If so, how?

    Different types of questions are best asked and answered by different types of solutions. Performance management, dashboards, and scorecards are about monitoring the status of a key metric. While ad hoc query tools are ideal for asking random or on-the-fly questions.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 5

    The ubiquitous availability of an Internet connection is having a profound impact on this question’s importance. Historically, for frontline workers like sales reps and truck drivers, the only connection back to the home office was though mobile phones. Today, police officers and truck drivers ride the streets with laptops by their side, connected via satellite to the Internet. Or, more likely, they are linked back to the information systems at home base through a BlackBerry, iPhone, or other smartphone.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 6

    Your BI deployment will be influenced by the required latency of the data involved. Business intelligence has three possible levels of latency – scheduled update, on demand, and real time.

    Scheduled update means that the information does not have to be up-to-the-minute. The data source could be updated on a scheduled basis, such as once a day or each hour. Or, the data can be near real time, updated incrementally within minutes of a transaction. The majority of BI deployments work well with some form of a scheduled update.

    On demand means that the user will require direct access to operational data or information contained in a near real-time data warehouse. While this does not necessarily affect the BI deployment itself, it is very uncommon for BI tools to give users access to operational systems, because operational data is usually not stored in a form that is conducive to creating ad hoc queries. However, dashboards, reports, and guided ad hoc reports are highly effective business intelligence deployment methods when on demand access is required.

    Finally, true real-time data is only needed to support the monitoring of frontline operational processes. True real time means that the information being displayed is updated as a business event occurs – even before the related data makes its way into a database. Only dashboards and reports enable the dynamic display and update of information as business events take place. Ad hoc query, guided ad hoc, and search are all tools that require a user to initiate information retrieval, which is not true real time because there is always a certain delay, no matter how small, between the event and the access of the related data.

    Six Questions You Need to Ask Before Deploying Business Intelligence - slide 7

    Understanding a user’s role gives you a certain perspective when it comes to their BI needs. For example, executives look primarily for the high-level status of a key performance indicator (KPI), while analysts will often spend their day analyzing data in great detail. A frontline worker, such as a customer service rep, often searches for information to solve a specific problem. While there may be some variations to roles and related needs from one organization to the next, understanding the idiosyncrasies of the various users in your particular company will help you create a more accurate profile of user requirements.

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