Publication

Business intelligence maturity assessment

The promise of business intelligence is well known

Many organizations use business intelligence (BI) tools to help them make better and more proactive decisions. The promise of BI is well known: beating the competition by understanding your data better and acting on it. Given the potential benefits, organizations engage in BI to make better decisions on all sorts of issues, such as pricing, timing market actions or improving process efficiencies. However, the success of BI depends on an organization’s capability to deliver it, which in turn is determined by the fundamentals – people, process and technology. We often find that BI investments are heaviest in the latest technologies but are sorely lacking in people and processes. An organization risks wasting time, money and reputation by failing to address all three. Throwing money or an army at your BI capability, while an effective method to boosting a capability, is hardly an option for most businesses, which must allocate resources judiciously and make a strong benefit case for any BI investment. In our view, investing in BI wisely requires treating it as a capability that will be measured, setting objectives and executing an improvement plan. A capability maturity assessment is therefore an essential tool to develop your BI capability, and to reap the highest returns on every dollar invested in BI.