Business Intelligence Requirements for IT: What every IT Manager Should Know about Users’ Real Need for BI

Business users and organizations need the ability to quickly analyze their data to identify issues, causes and opportunities for improvement. Once these analyses are identified, they need to be monitored and distributed often to others. With traditional business intelligence (BI), creating and maintaining effective and understandable analyses can take months to define and develop and require expensive resources to maintain.

In response, a new BI term has emerged: Operational Business Intelligence. It promises to empower everyone within an organization to make day-to-day decisions by using better analysis of sales and marketing trends, customer interactions, manufacturing plans, inventories and other areas of the business.

Seven major requirements businesses need to consider when evaluating this generation of BI:

1. Plug and Play: Leverage existing data stores and infrastructure
2. Help the business user see the answer faster
3. Provide the ability to rapidly analyze and problem-solve – not just report
4. Any Data, Any Time: Access data that IT doesn’t have
5. Self Service: Enable the business user to create new reports and views without IT
6. Collaboration: Deliver means for sharing and updating analyses and findings in real time
7. Require no training to start and only minimal training of sophisticated business users

Operational BI promises to be a core part of the answer but only when it meets the 7 key requirements of business users. Tableau allows companies to leverage their data assets in unprecedented ways.