In our last blog post, we uncovered four more questions that CIOs need to ask to see if the time is right to apply Agile BI capabilities to their business. This post will discuss the last three questions in this 10-question series.
8. Have your employees ever complained about inconsistent report results across dissimilar data sets?
For example, are the outcomes created by the same report consistent for a US database but incorrect for a European one? One potential cause is bad data quality in European databases, in which some values are missing (NULLs), or perhaps the standard query language (SQL) is inefficient for comparing attributes. One query may not work correctly for all products or parts when looking for correlation between two entities, especially when the products are totally dissimilar. Therefore, multiple queries must be established for each type of product or part.
9. Do your BI end users complain that they have no time for BI training?
If an e-Commerce site took up to a day for training, its shopping cart abandonment would be close to 100%, and the business would be bankrupt in no time! While this example is extreme, it shows the impact of traditional BI applications that require a certain amount of training. Even if training is acceptable in the back office, a busy salesman would never take a one-day training session but rather would meet with a potential customer so as to not miss an opportunity. A person in such a role needs the type of BI application that takes no time to implement and is close to 100% intuitive.
10. Does the BI request backlog appear to be perpetual?
Is this never-ending BI request backlog the result of all the common issues and challenges mentioned previously? Is this number becoming larger over time? Are you able to deliver requests to your BI users within a reasonable time? Do you wish to build the system once and let the user deal with most of their BI requests themselves with an intuitive tool that can quickly adapt to most new and various business requirements?
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This is the last article of our series “Is it time to add Agile BI capxabilities? 10 questions for CIOs.” Subscribe to our blog to find out more insightful information in the next post!
See also
8 Ways to Enhance Your Business Inteligence (BI) (Part 1)
8 Ways to Enhance Your Business Inteligence (BI) (Part 2)
5 Key Criterias When Choosing The Right Financial Accounting System