Overview

Our BI Success Model is vendor and tool agnostic. The capabilities represented in the model apply equally to enterprise engagements and departmental or tactical deployments. The BI Success Model illustrates the critical capabilities that drive successful BI initiatives by segmenting those capabilities into four major categories:

• Data-driven decision making
• Organizational readiness
• Technical readiness
• Measurable results

Data-Driven Decision Making

At the heart of any BI initiative, regardless of the business problems being addressed, lies the goal of instituting data-driven decision making in an organization. Business intelligence is all about making informed decisions based on solid data instead of on intuition or partial information. With effective BI systems, organizations can treat decision making as any other business process that can be evaluated and continuously improved.

Organizational Readiness

To leverage the full benefits of data-driven decision-making, organizations must adapt their processes and prepare their teams to take advantage of new BI capabilities. You may need to modify team member roles or create new roles to support data-driven decision making processes. What’s important is that everyone buys in to the overall vision and strategy. You have to be careful to ensure alignment of BI initiatives with overall corporate goals. Moreover, your organization must develop skills around software, processes, and data as well as new ways to think about peer interaction during the decision-making process.