Business Intelligence Needs Assessment
What Is a Needs Assessment? Why Have One?
A Business Intelligence (BI) Needs Assessment is a gap analysis that identifies the difference between how an organization is using technology from Information Builders and how they could be using it to effectively further their business. In today's competitive environment, a gap is a need.
The Approach
Information Builders’ BI consultants will work with your business and technology experts as a team. Using best BI practices, the team will design BI solutions that will provide your business professionals with the information necessary to more effectively manage your business.
A BI Needs Assessment will follow our proven approach:
- Customize the Needs Assessment plan, during the kickoff Joint Application Development (JAD) session, based on your organization’s agreed-upon scope of effort
- Perform interviews and undertake data gathering, assessment, and analysis
- Design prioritized BI solution recommendations to address the identified gaps
- Conduct a BI solutions review of the findings report with your BI team
BI Needs Assessment Deliverables
Each Needs Assessment will provide a findings report, a prioritized set of recommended implementations, and BI solution reviews and presentations. The findings report includes:
- Infrastructure requirements and deployment considerations
- Risks, constraints, costs, and times to implement
- Quantitative and qualitative benefits and the ROI associated with each solution
- Design considerations such as data issues, data sources, user interfaces and navigation, and security requirements
- Solution plans, including definition of the scope, time, and resources; suggested phases to rapidly provide benefits; and identification of key dependencies and integration issues with existing systems
Benefits
The BI Needs Assessment provides a clear and concise plan that lists a prioritized set of steps to close the gap and deliver expected ROIs. As a result, you will:
- Gain a complete picture of your organization’s expectations from a set of BI solutions
- Reduce the risks of a BI implementation by knowing the costs, time frames, and issues needed for a successful implementation
- Have an impartial assessment of the readiness of the organization to implement and make use of BI solutions
- Know key success factors of the BI solutions and strategies for managing implementation risk
- Demonstrate the business benefits of the BI solutions by tracking and measuring results according to criteria identified in the Needs Assessment
- Gain competitive advantage by identifying and planning the implementation of complete solutions that leverage Information Builders Consulting's best practices experience
- Maximize the effectiveness of organizational resources and achieve high user satisfaction and acceptance of your BI solutions
Next Step
Based on the breadth of the assessment and past experience with other clients, a Needs Assessment can typically be completed in 5 to 20 days.
Contact us for more information.
