Success factors of implementation..

Before implementing a BI solution, it is worth taking different factors into consideration before proceeding. According to Kimball et al., these are the three critical areas that you need to assess within your organization before getting ready to do a BI project:

1. The level of commitment and sponsorship of the project from senior management
2. The level of business need for creating a BI implementation.
3. The amount and quality of business data available. 

Business sponsorship:

The commitment and sponsorship of senior management is according to Kimball, the most important criteria for assessment. This is because having strong management backing helps overcome shortcomings elsewhere in the project. However, as Kimball state: “even the most elegantly designed DW/BI system cannot overcome a lack of business [management] sponsorship”.

It is important that management personnel who participate in the project have a vision and an idea of the benefits and drawbacks of implementing a BI system.

Business needs:

Because of the close relationship with senior management, another critical thing that must be assessed before the project begins is whether or not there is a business need and whether there is a clear business benefit by doing the implementation. The needs and benefits of the implementation are sometimes driven by competition and the need to gain an advantage in the market.

Companies that implement BI are often large, multinational organizations with diverse subsidiaries. A well-designed BI solution provides a consolidated view of key business data not available anywhere else in the organization, giving management visibility and control over measures that otherwise would not exist. 

Amount and quality of available data:

Without good data, it does not matter how good the management sponsorship or business-driven motivation is. Without proper data, or with too little quality data, any BI implementation fails. Before implementation it is a good idea to do data profiling. This analysis identifies the “content, consistency and structure of the data. This should be done as early as possible in the process and if the analysis shows that data is lacking, put the project on the shelf temporarily while the IT department figures out how to properly collect data.

These essential steps of business intelligence includes but not limited to:

1. Go through business data sources in order to collect needed data.
2. Convert business data to information and present appropriately.
3. Query and analyze data.
4. Act on those data collected.

User aspect:

When gathering the requirements from the business users, the local IT department should also be consulted in order to determine to which degree it is possible to fulfill the business's needs based on the available data. 

Taking on a user-centered approach throughout the design and development stage may further increase the chance of rapid user adoption of the BI system.

BI chances of success can be improved by involving senior management to help make BI a part of the organizational culture, and by providing the users with necessary tools, training, and support.

Training encourages more people to use the BI application.

BI Portals:

A Business Intelligence portal (BI portal) is the primary access interface for Data Warehouse (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) applications. The BI portal is the users first impression of the DW/BI system. It is typically a browser application, from which the user has access to all the individual services of the DW/BI system, reports and other analytical functionality. 

The BI portal must be implemented in such a way that it is easy for the users of the DW/BI application to call on the functionality of the application.

The BI portal needs to be easy to use and understand, and if possible have a similar look and feel as other applications or web content of the organization the DW/BI application it is designed for consistency.

The following is a list of desirable features for web portals in general and BI portals in particular:

Usable: User should easily find what they need in the BI tool.

Content Rich: The portal is not just a report printing tool, it should contain more functionality such as advice, help, support information and documentation.

Clean: The portal should be designed so it is easily understandable and not over complex as to confuse the users.

Current: The portal should be updated regularly.

Interactive: The portal should be implemented in a way that makes it easy for the user to use its functionality and encourage them to use the portal. Scalability and customization give the user the means to fit the portal to each user.

Value Oriented: It is important that the user has the feeling that the DW/BI application is a valuable resource that is worth working on..