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5 Steps to Successful Business Intelligence

Verify Pressure For Change - Successful BI deployments are driven by a pressure to change. Only when the opportunity associated with better decisions or the pain of poor decisions is clearly recognized and exceeds the collective effort of cash outlay, dedicating resources and business interruption will enough pressure exist to go the distance with a BI solution. Attempting to implement a BI solution, however legitimate the intention, when decision makers don't recognize a decision making dilemma is an uphill fight that will be met with change management resistance such as waning sponsorship, IT reluctance and user adoption challenges. If you find yourself in this position, begin with an education agenda and see if you gain momentum.
Quantify Stakeholder Objectives - In determining stakeholder objectives it's necessary to first define your stakeholders. As with all enterprise software deployments, visible and vocal executive sponsorship is a must, so soliciting executive team expectations early is paramount. Beyond that, if you're beginning with a departmental or line of business project, your stakeholders will likely include those business unit directors or managerial staff as well as line managers and support staff who are held to performance standards which materially affect the departments measurable objectives. Each of these roles holds relevant first hand information, is key to a successful deployment and must be afforded the opportunity to identify their objectives. Not all objectives may make project scope, but all should be surfaced, heard and considered.
Dedicate Resources - While executives and decision makers seek business intelligence solutions which can be configured, tailored and exercised without much or any IT involvement, it's a mistake to select or attempt to implement a BI product without IT participation. Even with Software as a Service (SaaS) BI solutions, which are easily provisioned on-demand and more quickly deployed, BI requires data cleansing, data staging and transfer, and integrating and consolidating data from a number of usually disparate information systems and technologies. These tasks will certainly benefit from technical talent on the IT team.
Determine The Most Salient Metrics - Identifying the key performance indicators (KPIs) which are most influential in advancing business objectives is a pre-requisite to a successful BI program. KPIs must be aligned with the business imperatives that they are benchmarking. It's critical to make sure you measure KPIs that really drive performance, and not measures which are easily retrievable or traditionally reported.
Identify Data Sources -After identifying what data is needed, create an inventory of data sources. For CRM analytics, the bulk of data is likely to reside in the Customer Relationship Management system. However, additional data stores are likely, and may include a marketing automation system, email and groupware systems, a Content Management System (CMS), an accounting software system, an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, shadow systems or even Excel spreadsheets. While internal transaction-based applications hold a wealth of structured data, it's the unstructured data residing in external social media and other repositories that presents both opportunity and challenge. Unstructured social content residing on social networks, blogs, rating and review sites, and online communities, to name a few, possess valuable contributory data that can be appended to existing information to add further perspective and insight for decision makers.