When Does Business Intelligence (BI) Helps You To Link Business Strategy To Performance?

Gartner considers Business Intelligence (BI) and Information Management (IM) as important subjects. One of the applications of BI is to link business strategy to performance!

Some findings of the recent quarterly report of Gartner on BI are:

• If companies do not carefully qualify, manage, and add value to data, they limit the usefulness of the content, and do not manage information as a business asset.
• The effective management of information is often a distinguishing characteristic of high performance organizations.
• Using information to accomplish the linking of business strategy to performance is a business competence, not an IT competence.

For some 15 years I have been helping companies turning data into information. The Gartner findings correspond with my own experience. Major reasons why the application of BI is disappointing are related to the legacy system life cycle:

• Over time systems have suffered from software errors.
• They have suffered from user errors.
• The business requirements have changed over the years.

The result is that you must carefully validate BI results. If you do not carefully manage those issues, the result can unpredictable, and disappointment is your fate.

My advice is to make the transition step by step, and system by system. Analyze carefully what and how the business operation is reporting, and what it wants and should report. Among other things it should report how thebusiness strategy is linked to performance.

Are you satisfied with your BI, and does it link your business strategy to performance? Let Requirements Management know!