Business Intelligence News by Marcus Borba

Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence in 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 05:59:00 +0000

The Business Intelligence scenario has evolved greatly in recent times, with new trends, approaches, concepts and tools. Early this month, I already shared my thoughts for the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, in a post entitled Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts, where Julie B. Hunt, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and I talked about the BI Resolution for Companies and the Top 3 Trends for Industry. It's worth reading.

Here are my BI Resolution and a more comprehensive list of the top trends, that in my opinion, will impact Business Intelligence in 2012:

BI Resolution for Companies

Take advantage of the emerging BI trends to make organizations actually become a democracy of information, with business intelligence being used for everyone, anywhere, anytime.

Top Trends That Will Impact Business Intelligence in 2012

Mobile BI – The proliferation of smartphones and tablets in the enterprise, and the need to make decisions anywhere/anytime accessing real-time analytics make mobile BI remain a hot topic. There are several companies that specialize in developing mobile BI applications and most BI vendors also have developed a mobile version. Howard Dresner, who recently published the latest version of the Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study, considers that mobile BI becomes fundamentally the new platform for business intelligence.

Cloud BI – The cloud-based BI will boost the use of BI. The cloud model allows the companies to save money, with faster implementation without substantial investments. It is also ease of use. Although there are many concerns about implementing BI on the cloud (mainly security), the vendors and the market as a whole have matured. It is important to remember that it’s necessary to have a well-defined data integration strategy to implement a successful cloud-based BI.

Big Data – The amount of data in our world has been growing exponentially, and the uses of big data in the BI scenario will allow companies to put data to work more efficiently. They could really turn into data-driven enterprises.

Self-Service BI - With BI tools even easier to use, and the results easy to consume, enabling more flexibility and analytics capabilities to nontechnical users, the business users are less dependent on the IT.

In-Memory Analytics - The growing need of companies for high-performance analytics applications, with the ability to provide high speed of access in a big amount of data, make the interest in In-Memory Analytics platforms increases more and more.

Open Source BI - The Open-source BI has evolved significantly with more complete and sofisticated tools. They are being implemented by large, medium and small companies, moving toward mainstream.

Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis - The growing use of social media for the companies (several companies have Twitter account and Facebook page) along with the need of collect and analyze many kinds of unstructured data are becoming the text analytics and sentiment analysis increasingly important.

Collaborative BI - BI tools with embedded collaboration capabilities allow BI users to share information and work together more easily and efficiently. People like and are familiar with the use of social media tools, thus facilitating the widespread use of Social and Collaborative BI.

How to Manage Budget

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 21:32:00 +0000

(Click on comic strip to view larger image)
Dilbert by Scott Adams-Dilbert ©2012, Universal Uclick
Published at January 15, 2012 in dilbert.com

Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 03:41:00 +0000

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published yesterday a post entitled Top BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012 from Industry Experts, where Julie B. Hunt, Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro and I share our thoughts on BI Resolutions and Trends for 2012.

Thank you so much to the people of Spotfire's blog for the invitation to share my thoughts on the subject.

The BI Year in Review

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 14:02:00 +0000

The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) published in December a retrospective called The BI Year in Review. The retrospective, written by Stephen Swoyer, is a well-detailed article about what happened in BI area in 2011. Below is a summary of the article:

Interacting with BI Apps and the Impact of Mobile Computing

In 2011, the evolving BI usage paradigm officially moved beyond the desktop LCD: smartphones and tablets aren’t simply being supported, they’re being actively cultivated. One upshot of this is that nearly every purveyor of BI client offerings has a mobile or tablet strategy that tends to mix support for mobile devices of all kinds -- chiefly via HTML5-based Web applications -- and device-specific support, usually (but not always) limited to Apple Inc.’s iOS devices.

For now, let’s just say that the way in which we interact with BI is going to change. Drastically. After all, it already has changed, and what we expect from BI applications has changed, too. Even before 2011, innovation in BI had already outstripped the bread-and-butter contexts in which business intelligence had been served up for decades. These old-school interfaces -- viz., spreadsheets, with their cells, rows, and columns; static charts, diagrams, scorecards, and so on -- haven’t so much been replaced as been supplemented: enriched.

Advanced Social Studies

The socialization of BI has been inexorable. Not fast. Not slow. Inexorable. The trend this year might be called Creeping Socialization. It was a phenomenon in which at least a dozen BI vendors kicked off efforts to retrofit their offerings with social media (or social media-like) capabilities.

However, 2011 wasn’t the year in which BI first became social. Nor was it the year in which BI completed its social makeover. It was, instead, the first full year in which the industry gravitated, inexorably and irrevocably, toward social BI.

No Room for Squares

BI usage models aren’t the only things changing. This year brought a reconfiguration of the industry pecking order, with the emergence of several small or upstart competitors and the reinvention -- or reorientation -- of a number of established players, too. Several vendors say they’re exploiting gaps in the existing BI marketplace: i.e., segments, pain points, or use cases that they say are ill-served by existing offerings -- or by existing usage paradigms.

Changes in Attitude

Established players repositioned themselves to exploit opportunities in the ever-evolving data integration (DI) and data virtualization (DV) marketplace.

Maximum Consumption

Few industries have produced as much acquisition activity as the BI space over the last decade. This year, consolidation in the analytic database arena -- long-anticipated, and, starting in 2010, partially realized -- continued apace, with Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) gobbling up columnar database powerhouse Vertica Inc. Not to be outdone, Teradata Inc. acquired analytic database highflier Aster Data Inc. Along with the former Greenplum Software Inc., which was acquired last year by EMC Corp., Aster was one of the first two analytic database entrants to bring a native implementation of MapReduce to market. There are still plenty of extant analytic database competitors, however. Veterans Infobright, Kognitio, and ParAccel, along with newer entrants including Algebraix Data Corp. and Actian Corp. (the former Ingres Corp.), seem determined to keep things interesting.

Also this year, Oracle Corp. ponied up $1 billion to acquire Endeca Corp., an established vendor that specialized in faceted search. Although search was indisputably Endeca’s bread and butter -- its technology is used to power at least half of the Top 100 e-commerce sites -- the company believed it could make a big splash in the BI market, too.

A Torrent of Tablets

Enterprise IT organizations are proceeding apace with tablet computing adoption efforts: many are already using iPads (or, less frequently, competitive tablet offerings) in production, while most are at least mulling tablet strategies.

A study from software development researcher Evans Data Corp. found that a majority of mobile developers are focusing on Web apps instead of native apps -- in spite of the dominance of the iPad or (in the small-form-factor mobile arena) the iOS or Android platforms.

This is a good retrospective on the BI area in 2011. The BI scenario is changing dramatically, with new concepts, technologies and tools. I believe that 2012 will be no different.

Happy New Year!

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:14:00 +0000

Happy New Year for all of you!

Peace, Love, Health, Happiness, Prosperity and Success!

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 15:14:00 +0000

Merry Christmas! Happy Holidays!

Wishing you all the joy, hope and wonder of the season!

Peace, love, health and happiness!

Crowd Behaviour

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 11:27:00 +0000

Steve Walker's Tweet caught my attention about this funny comic strip.

(Click on comic strip to view larger image or click here)
Published in xkcd.com. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

How to Hire the Best People

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sun, 06 Nov 2011 17:25:00 +0000

(Click on comic strip to view larger image)
Dilbert by Scott Adams-Dilbert ©2011, United Feature Syndicate,Inc.
Published at November 6, 2011 in dilbert.com

Some advice for your BI initiative does not become a scary halloween story

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 02:59:00 +0000

Today is Halloween, it's celebrated in a variety of ways and activities including trick-or-treating, wearing masks and telling scary stories. But when you are implementing an BI initiative, you don't want to hear scary stories. Here are some advice for your BI initiative does not become a scary halloween story:

The definition of a BI strategy plan is crucial to implement a successful BI.

First of all, you need understand your business issues before implement your BI, aligning the business goals with the BI strategy.

When you start the process to implement BI in your company, it is essential that you have an executive sponsor that has influence on all divisions and business units of the company, because it is necessary to show and persuade the business that BI is not just another IT project, is a continuous process to delivery better information to the company make better decisions.

It is interesting to consider the creation of a Business Intelligence Steering Committee. The BI Steering Committee includes the senior representatives of the principal areas of the company and the BI manager. The BI Steering Committee will work like a gear to BI.

It is interesting also to consider the creation of a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC). The BICC must be a center of expertise for BI, sharing resources, best practices and support to maximize its use in the company. The BICC can be physical or virtual (a team with defined roles and tasks).

Create and maintain a high-performance BI Team.

The BI Team and the business users need to develop together a business-focused metadata that provide all the business requirements.

Identify the gaps between the current state of your organization and the state you want when you implement your BI, and define a plan to close the gaps and achieve the goals.

Choose carefully your BI Tools, and it's important to have ongoing training the users on the BI tools and how to use better the data in the tools, also offering the right BI tool to the right user group, recognizing the importance of BI front-end tools in attracting the users.

Big Changes for BI, Big Opportunities for IT

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:49:00 +0000

Recently, I watched a very good video with two Business Intelligence thought leaders, Howard Dresner and Donald Farmer. In the video, entitled Big Changes for BI, Big Opportunities for IT, they discuss the evolving landscape of BI. Worth watching!

According the video description:
"The BI landscape is rapidly shifting to take advantage of new technologies, including consumer-like apps, mobile devices, and self service. That evolution presents IT with some exciting opportunities—and some daunting challenges. In this video, independent analyst Howard Dresner and QlikView's Donald Farmer help prepare you for both. Dresner also shares the findings from his recently completed Wisdom of the Crowds BI Market Study. This user-driven assessment of the BI industry provides timely insights you won't find anywhere else."

RIP Steve Jobs

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 04:33:00 +0000

The world has lost one of the most important and creative guy in the tech industry of all time. Steve Jobs was visionary and charismatic, his contribution to the technology evolution is of inestimable value, he was truly a genius. He is also considered one of the greatest marketers in corporate history, his performances in keynote presentations, lectures and speeches were always memorable.

RIP Steve! You challenged the world to "think different"!

Tribute to Steve Jobs in the main page of Apple's site

Steven P. Jobs: His Life, His Companies, His Products

Steve Jobs also gave great speeches, as the Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005:

P.S. - Early last year, I wrote a post on Steve Jobs called The presentation secrets of Steve Jobs

Dilbert on Data Quality

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 03:44:00 +0000

(Click on comic strip to view larger image)
Dilbert by Scott Adams-Dilbert ©2011, United Feature Syndicate,Inc.
Published at May 7, 2008 in dilbert.com

The Promise and Peril of Big Data

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 02:55:00 +0000

I watched recently a great panel on Big Data entitled Intelligence, Intuition and Information; The Promise and Peril of Big Data, recorded at Aspen Ideas Festival, with David Craig, James Fallows, John Hagel and Patricia Sellers. About this panel from Aspen Ideas Festival: "We all love information, and research tells us we want more of it-all the time. But Google doesn't know us. Is too much of a good thing manageable? How do we trust the information we receive? How do we intelligently connect the dots?" The panelists discuss these questions. Watch and enjoy.

Dilbert on Corporate Strategy

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 05:10:00 +0000

(Click on comic strip to view larger image)
Dilbert by Scott Adams-Dilbert ©2011, United Feature Syndicate,Inc.
Published at June 10, 2007 in dilbert.com

Corporates need to hard sell strategy to their people

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 16:00:00 +0000

I read a good article on balanced scorecard in The Economic Times, with some statements from David Norton about the applications of BSC nowadays. The article, written by Dibeyendu Ganguly, tells when David Norton and Robert Kaplan introduced the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) as a strategy execution tool some 20 years ago, four American companies adopted the idea and implemented it very successfully, and had something else in common at that point — they were all led by CEOs with military backgrounds. David Norton said that it's not coincidence,the BSC fits the military. In a military operation, an officer who goes into the field may not return. But the operation has to go on. So people down the line need to know the strategy being deployed.

In the corporate world, the BSC is meant to turn vision into action and provide daily marching orders to the corporate soldier, and it helps create organisation-wide alignment around strategy. "We were moving from the product economy to the knowledge economy and the BSC proved to be a very effective tool for the new age," says Norton.

"I'd say only 30% of those who use the BSC actually use it as we described," says Norton."Some companies see it purely at a measurement tool, a way to create KPIs (key performance indicators). It gets used by engineers and middle managers, not the CEO. On the other hand, it is now being used by governments in Brazil, Philippines, Abu Dhabi, to execute developmental strategies. The BSC is about strategy execution, about results."

"Strategy is about change, and that's never easy," says Norton, "The leadership has to have a strategy and see to it that it is executed. But CEOs really have a hard time influencing change in their organisations." Strategy is formulated by the Board, executive leadership and senior management, with inputs from shareholders and analysts, but it has to executed by the line management and front line staff. Good organisations also share their strategy with customers, suppliers, regulators and society.

This communication, says Norton, can be viewed as an advertising exercise. You begin by selecting the target audience you want to reach and then let loose a stream of messages through various communication channels, ranging from brochures to videos to mouse pads with strategy maps. It works at a subliminal level." says Norton. "You have to tell them seven times in seven different ways: try my new strategy, you'll like it. Sometimes, front line employees are disengaged and simply not interested in learning about company strategy. Some employees may be totally focused on their jobs and indifferent to the larger picture. It is still in the company's interest to reach out to all employees since alignment amplifies the power of strategy. One way to get employees interested in strategy is to link their incentives to execution . The BSC can have anything from six to 20 target measures on which organisational units are evaluated and individual bonuses can be linked to these targets .

The BSC is a powerful tool, but needs a well-defined execution strategy in order to obtain the expected success. All the employees need to understand the organization's strategy and understand what they can do to contribute to the success of the strategy. Without this, you can define a great strategy, but you will hardly be able to implement it successfully.

How analytics and social media are being combined in a unique way

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 06:27:00 +0000

BizIntelligence.TV, the video channel initiative created by Microsoft's Bruno Aziza, has published great video interviews. I recently watched two interesting interviews on social media measurement.

The first interview is with Dave Mariani, VP of Engineering at Klout. According the video information: "What's your Klout? By now you may have heard of the social media scoring company, but how do they measure influence? We recently sat down with Dave Mariani, VP of Engineering at the rapidly growing firm. Dave has a history of working with big data, and is right at home with Klout. Dave discusses how Klout works, the networks they currently measure and plan to expand to, and how they are helping brands connect with consumers. Watch the video and see how analytics and social media are being combined in a unique way!"

The second interview is with Brian Solis. According the video information: "Brian is well-known in the social media space and has written a number of books that deal with this topic including his most recent, Engage! He is also a principal at the Altimeter Group, an advisory firm dealing with disruptive technologies. Bruno and Brian cover many different topics including companies that "get" social media, the concept of Nine-Inch Marketing, and measuring effectiveness of social media campaigns. Watch the video and learn more from the man Bruno titled a "Social Media Anthropologist!"

Try something new for 30 days

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sat, 02 Jul 2011 04:55:00 +0000

TED published a short but interesting video in its series TED Talks In less than 6 minutes, entitled Try something new for 30 days, by Matt Cutts, an engineer at Google. In the presentation, Matt commented about a nice approach to set and achieve goals: Try something new for 30 days. "The idea is actually pretty simple. Think about something you've always wanted to add to your life and try it for the next 30 days. It turns out, 30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit -- like watching the news -- from your life."

How to Capture Nonfunctional Requirements

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:51:00 +0000

Information Management published this week a nice post entitled How to Capture Nonfunctional Requirements, written by Sastry Kolluru and Shantaram Nishtala, where they commented about an important issue: the nonfunctional requirements gathering.

The business users define the functional requirements substantially well but are challenged when detailing nonfunctional requirements. Asking business the right questions can achieve a better business-IT alignment, they wrote. In a typical data integration initiative, it is not uncommon that functional requirements may not be completely defined early in the project lifecycle; they get clarified as the project progresses. The clarity on nonfunctional aspects is much lower. NFRs are stated informally during the requirements gathering, are often contradictory, difficult to enforce during software development and hard to validate when the software system is ready for delivery.

They listed some reasons because the nonfunctional requirements seem less clear:
- There’s a lack of understanding about what to include as nonfunctional requirements;
- No one is sure what should be specified, this results in exclusion or specification of unrealistic nonfunctional requirements; and
- People assume it is implicit.

They defined some key questions that could be used to define Nonfunctional Requirements in some areas: Performance, Scalability, Reliability, Maintainability, Extensibility, Security and Resource Utilization.

Effectively gathering NFRs is a key success factor for all data integration initiatives. Understanding the types of NFRs and following a systematic approach for capturing them can help identify quantifiable and measurable NFRs, they concluded.

A requirements gathering (functional and nonfunctional) is a vital step to develop a succesful data integration initiative. You should understand well what the business users need, the difference between mandating “what” versus “how” and also define a transparent process to follow through the entire project lifecycle.

Dilbert on processes

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Wed, 04 May 2011 11:35:00 +0000

(Click on comic strip to view larger image)
Dilbert by Scott Adams-Dilbert ©2011, United Feature Syndicate,Inc.
Published at April 27, 2011 in dilbert.com

2 More Hot Trends in Business Intelligence

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 04:55:00 +0000

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today the Part Two of the update of the post 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence, written by me 6 months ago, entitled 2 More Hot Trends in Business Intelligence. The Part One 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update), was published last week.

Earlier this year, I also published a post on their blog with Business Intelligence Predictions for 2011.

Thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the invitation to write guest posts. I am truly grateful.

7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update)

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 04:41:00 +0000

Trends and Outliers, the TIBCO Spotfire's Business Intelligence Blog, published today a guest blog post written by me, entitled 7 Hot Trends in Business Intelligence (An Update). This post is an update of a post written 6 months ago.

Once again, thank you to the people of Spotfire blog for the opportunity.

Business Intelligence Trumps Facebook

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 04:48:00 +0000

Baseline published a post commenting on their research Top 10 Tech Trends of 2011, where they identified that the enthusiasm is for business analytics and knowledge management, where nearly two-thirds of new commitments are expected to be at a strong or very strong level. According Baseline research, while social networking may be a hot topic, finding a way to make sense of all that data with BI systems will be the 2nd biggest tech trend of 2011.

The survey showed about 9 percent more organizations expecting significant deployments of Business intelligence (BI) systems in 2011, compared with last year’s survey. And it’s high on end-users’ and finance’s wish lists. The driver of this interest seems to be the need to corral all these new, usually disorganized information sources.

According Bill Bosler, CIO at Texas Consultants: “Some social networking techniques will clearly impact all users, and deployments will continue at their own pace -- independent of corporate intent”, which recently designed an ambitious BI tool as part of a new oil refinery project in the Middle East. “There will be plenty of action on the analytics side, crunching all the new real-time data collected by both new and traditional means, and anticipating and mitigating challenges before they occur.”

Celebrating 3 years of blogging

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 11:36:00 +0000

My blog is completing 3 years today. I started this blog as a means to express my interests in Business Intelligence and related themes.

Thank you for reading my blog for the last three years. Your readership is really appreciated.

Below are the most popular posts (no order) in the last 3 years:

- Culture eats strategy for breakfast
- Several executives trust gut
- Does your company have a BI strategy?
- Strategies for Creating a High-Performance BI Team
- Are You Ready to Reengineer Your Decision Making?
- How to Use Twitter as a "Twool"
- Interview with Balanced Scorecard Co-Creator Dr. Robert Kaplan

All books reviews have always been well accessed, I would like to highlight:

- Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change - Howard Dresner
- Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning - Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris
- The Balanced Scorecard - Translating Strategy Into Action - Robert Kaplan and David Norton
- The Data Warehouse Toolkit: The Complete Guide to Dimensional Modeling - Ralph Kimball and Margy Ross
- Five Key Principles of Corporate Performance Management - Bob Paladino
- Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business - Wayne Eckerson

As you may have noticed, I'm a huge fan of Dilbert. All Dilbert's comic strip I published have been well accessed too, mainly:
- Dilbert on making decisions

Leveraging Business Intelligence to Achieve Strategic Priorities

noreply@blogger.com (Marcus Borba) — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 03:13:00 +0000

B-Eye-Network published a nice post, written by Nancy Williams, where she commented how companies are using BI to drive profits and business performance. She compared a recent IDC study of corporate priorities that drive the use of consulting firms, with a her survey, about how companies are leveraging business intelligence. The top three of IDC study were improving operational efficiency, creating a more effective business model, and reducing costs, and she got similar results in her survey.

She commented that well-designed BI applications give companies the ability to measure, manage, control, and improve business performance. From scorecards and dashboards that report on performance, to sophisticated analytics that uncover root causes of unfavorable trends and predict the impact of alternatives courses of action, BI is a critical tool in the modern manager's toolkit. She mentioned some examples:

Business Intelligence and Operational Efficiency: For the COO and operations management professionals, BI provides precise and granular information for cost analysis, analytical tools for monitoring and improving customer service and product quality, and high-quality historical facts about demand for forecasting and capacity planning.

Business Intelligence and More Effective Business Models: From a strategic perspective, a more effective business model is one that enables a company to achieve sustained growth, competitive advantage, and suitable profitability. Business intelligence provides critical information about growth and profitability trends from a number of key perspectives

From a tactical or operational perspective, BI provides CFOs and financial management professionals with a precise and granular understanding of the relationship between operational performance and financial results and better tools for performance management, forecasting, and working capital management. BI provides the CMO, sales leaders, and marketing professionals a key tool for better customer segmentation, more precise campaign targeting, improved customer service and customer retention.

Business Intelligence and Cost Reduction: Business intelligence allows cost analysis from multiple perspectives, such as activity costs, relevant costs, incremental costs, fixed and variable costs, and controllable costs. Armed with better cost information, managers can reduce costs in intelligent ways that leave critical capabilities intact.

In order to leverage BI to achieve your company's strategic priorities, it helps to have a BI strategy that is well-aligned with your business strategy, she wrote. She recommends companies take the following key steps for leveraging Business Intelligence:

1. Do a structured analysis of opportunities where better BI would be useful for improving operational efficiency, creating a more effective business model, and/or reducing costs.
2. Prioritize the BI opportunities according to business impact, technical risk, business adoption risk, and competitive impact.
3. Develop a business case built around the prioritized BI opportunities, which together comprise a BI portfolio.
4. Assess your current state capabilities for executing a BI program and identify key gaps, if any.
5. Develop a pragmatic roadmap that includes program management activities, BI application projects, technical infrastructure projects, business process change management projects, and generation of BI program performance metrics.

In addition to ensuring tight alignment between the BI program and strategic business priorities, this approach will enable the CIO and BI Director to do a better job of meeting the demands of business users, she concluded.

Nancy Williams co-wrote with Steve Williams, a very good book called The Profit Impact of Business Intelligence (I wrote a book review on this book)