What is BI and how can it improve performance?

Implementing a BI tool

This section gives a quick outline of some of the major steps required for a Business Intelligence system implementation.

The most important point in implementing a BI tool is to first carry out a pilot implementation on a small aspect of the system. There are several reasons for this:

• You need to get buy-in from users in order to give your project momentum. A quick pilot implementation that gives some quick wins to the users will ensure that they will be clamouring for more and giving lots of feedback on usability, functionality, etc. This will make subsequent phases easier to implement.
• You need to reinforce the buy-in from company management in order to ensure that you have a champion at a level high enough to influence any budgetary restrictions. A pilot implementation that is really useful will help this.
• A pilot project is great for getting feedback from users on the product’s usability, functionality, performance and usefulness. This is essential information to use during subsequent phases.
• A pilot project will increase your knowledge of the chosen system and its limitations
• A pilot scheme will ensure that you have a better knowledge of all data that is collated for the BI system and will iron out many of the data cleansing issues that you may have. However, there is no need to try to sort out all data issues for the pilot scheme – this would drag out the project unnecessarily.
• Many integration issues will be spotted and ironed out in a pilot project.