Business intelligence can mean two completely different things depending on whether you're looking at it from a technical perspective or a managerial perspective.

For a business intelligence solution to really add value, you need to your key performance indicators, (KPI's) or business goals. Once you've got your business intelligence tools, you need to understand what sort of results you're hoping to achieve from the data they collect. Business intelligence is all about bridging that gap between the data collected and what your people need to drive the business to improve, once you've got the data you need to understand how you can use it to make your organisation more productive and ultimately profitable. This is where most businesses can experience difficulty; you need to make sure the people within your organisation understand the new systems and procedures that come about due to your business intelligence solution.

One of the main challenges with business intelligence is making it work across all the departments within your organisation and the staff within those different departments as you quite often find it exposes the differences between them. The data you're reporting off at an operational level is very siloed so you have a single set of users and a fairly narrow scope of requirements, so, for example, your finance package will do finance, your sales CRM system will do CRM, they're very isolated and actually quite stable in they're functionality, their requirements and the data that goes into them. The problem arises when you compare the data, when you start going across boundaries within your organisation because this usually highlights issues of consistency and management issues around communication. This is the main challenge with business intelligence, you have to pull different people together from different parts of your organisation to overcome users with different requirements, and skill sets, the easiest way to overcome this is to do short deliveries into each department and have an organisational structure with a BI steering committee, this means all the bodies pull together so when there's any conflict there's senior management can identify it, resolve it and move on.

To gain real value from a business intelligence solution you need a business intelligence strategy driven from the senior executives. Business intelligence spans different departments within an organisation, so without that overview from the top driving it, the barriers between departments can cause problem when implementing the solution and getting the value across the enterprise. Business intelligence requires many different tools for it to be deployed efficiently and the data it produces can end up in several different formats and styles, this all means that it's truly cross enterprise and multi skilled which in turn means you'll need a strategy to drive how you want it rolled out to the right people at the right time and what the purpose is.

The business intelligence maturity model is the mechanism used to gage where your organisation is today in its maturity of business intelligence and highlight where your organisation could potentially go in the future. The maturity model can be very beneficial when trying to calculate the potential benefit of business intelligence.

Business intelligence bridges the gap between the business and the data, which is usually managed by IT, quite often the people delivering the information from IT are not always aligned to what the business is asking for, similarly the business doesn't always understand the technology, or the capabilities of it. Organisations will often put a middle layer in-between to bridge this gap called business analysts. These business analysts may sit with the IT department or they may sit in the business, but the business analysts are there to help the organisation overcome those communication barriers. Setting up a team to work across the enterprise is what's called creating a BI centric organisation. This is how you ensure you get the maximum benefit from you business intelligence data.

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IT Performs business intelligence consultancy improves the way companies measure and manage business, through developed methodologies and frameworks ensuring lower risk and higher quality