Best Practices to implement BI in your company

Currently, with the complexity of business and the necessity to make decisions quickly, implement a Business Intelligence project on the companies is crucial, but not easy.

Because this, you need to adopt some best practices to achieve implement a successful BI.

First of all, you need understand your business issues before implement your BI, aligning the business goals with the BI strategy, creating a solid partnership with business and IT.

When you start the process to implement BI in your company, it is essential that you have an executive sponsor that has influence on all divisions and business units of the company, because it is necessary to show and persuade the business that BI is not just another IT project, is a continuous process to delivery better information to the company make better decisions.

It is interesting to consider the creation of a Business Intelligence Steering Committee. The BI Steering Committee includes the senior representatives of the principal areas of the company and the BI manager. The BI Steering Committee will work like a gear to BI project.

It is interesting also to consider the creation of a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). The BICC must be a center of expertise for BI, sharing resources, best practices and support to maximize its use in the company. The BICC can be physical or virtual (a team with defined roles and tasks).

When you are gathering business requirements, you should to talk with persons in different levels of the company, from directors, managers to analysts. If possible, use two persons from requirements team in each meeting, and always invite more than a single user to represent the business in each meeting, even when you think that the subject is easy. You should to document what you learned in the meeting and give feedback with the results. Remember that you should keep the scope of your DW/BI requirements process. During the process, you should use many approaches, from the traditional method to ask the people what they want, also looking for study how the processes work through the company, how the people work, how they make decisions, which information they need to make decisions and when they need those information.

The IT and the business need to develop together a business-focused metadata that provide all the business requirements.

It is very important to check the data quality in the source systems before start the BI development, because one of the main keys of success to a well implemented BI is the data quality. (I wrote about this in a previous post called The concern about data quality).

Choose carefully your BI Tools, looking for standardization. Of course, you can and should choice a BI vendor to front-end, and others to the back-end as data warehouse platform or ETL tool. The standardization is mainly in the BI front-end tools (query, reporting and analysis); you should choice only one BI suite of tools that attend all the front-end requirements. What you shouldn't buy different tools from the different vendors to the same area of BI, like to buy multiple reporting or query tools.

Ongoing training the users on the BI tools and how to use better the data in the tools, also offering the right BI tool to the right user group, recognizing the importance of BI front-end tools in attracting the users.

If you are migrating from the old DW/BI to a new project, it is very important define before start the new project, a group to identify and solve all problems about data before and during the migration of environment. This group should be consisting of business and IT people, and define together guidelines about data quality, to ensure that the right data are move to new DW/BI environment.

Always keep in your mind that Business Intelligence has to delivery the right information when it is required, in the right format, in the right time to the right people.