In a recent webinar, Ten Changes to Maximize the Impact of Your Business Intelligence Strategy, Gartner presented some fresh ideas on how to approach the analysis of so much data, making it useful for the enterprise. There is no doubt an effective business intelligence (BI) strategy includes IT, but what else? Gartner says the secret can be found by asking three questions:

1)    What is the business objective?
Is it to use business intelligence to make better decisions? Will new business intelligence impact your bottom line, and if so, how? Or will it help you solve particular pain points around cost reduction or enhancing the customer experience in a service center, for instance?

2)    Who needs and will use the information to achieve the business objective?
Is it your product development team who needs competitive design information? Is it your overseas manufacturing facility that needs to improve internal processes

3)    How can we extract and make sense of the information to be used?  This is where IT historically focuses and excels in terms of technical provisioning, competence, and execution. 

The challenge to really make BI work for your organization is working outside traditional boundaries. The first step is to discover what information is needed by which work groups. Then it’s time to consider new ways to deliver results. This is when you may ask yourself, is there a better way? Here are some things to consider:

Once you’ve road- tested some of these new ideas, go back and ask the first question again. Did we meet the business objective? Are we making better decisions? Are we delivering BI in a way that is a catalyst for new product innovations, new revenue streams, and new opportunities?