Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering: What to do Before Building Dashboards

insightsoftware is the most comprehensive provider of solutions for the Office of the CFO. We turn information into insights, empowering business leaders to strategically drive their organization.

Too often people equate BI with reports or dashboards but those are the end results. There’s a lot more at play before one reaches that stage (read: final stage) of business intelligence. And even before one begins the process of choosing the proper BI product and building a BI solution, there’s one critical exercise that defines the project’s scope: requirements gathering.

Like any other project, to make your Business Intelligence (BI) project a real success, comprehensive requirements gathering is the first and the most important step of the business intelligence life cycle journey.

What are Business Intelligence Requirements?

Business Intelligence (BI) requirements are the specific needs and criteria that an organization must address to successfully implement and utilize BI tools and systems. These requirements encompass a broad range of factors, from the technical infrastructure to the data and analytics capabilities necessary to support informed decision-making.

Key Components of BI Requirements

• Data Sources: Identifying the various internal and external data sources that will feed into the BI system is crucial. This includes determining the types of data (structured, unstructured, real-time, historical) and how they will be integrated into a centralized system for analysis.
• Data Quality and Governance: Ensuring the accuracy, consistency, and security of the data is essential. BI requirements often include protocols for data cleaning, validation, and governance to maintain high data quality and integrity.
• User Access and Security: Defining who will access the BI system and what level of data they can view or manipulate is a critical requirement. This involves setting up role-based access controls and ensuring data security and privacy.
• Reporting and Visualization: The ability to generate comprehensive reports and visualize data in a way that is meaningful to end-users is a fundamental BI requirement. This includes identifying the types of reports, dashboards, and visualizations needed by different departments or user groups.
• Scalability and Performance: BI systems need to be scalable to accommodate growing data volumes and user demands. Performance requirements address how quickly the system can process and deliver insights, even as data complexity increases.
• Integration with Existing Systems: The BI tools must seamlessly integrate with the organization’s existing systems, such as ERP, CRM, and other databases, to provide a holistic view of the business.
• User Training and Support: To ensure successful adoption, BI requirements often include provisions for user training, ongoing support, and documentation. This helps ensure that all stakeholders can effectively use the BI tools and leverage them to their full potential.
• Regulatory Compliance: Many industries have specific regulatory requirements that BI systems must comply with, particularly in terms of data handling and reporting. Ensuring that the BI system meets these legal and regulatory standards is a key requirement.

Why is business intelligence requirements gathering important?

Each department of a business has different goals and objectives they wish to achieve with the help of business intelligence and analytics and therefore their requirements are different too. A well-documented BI Solution Requirements Report will result in the following:

• Address business, data, technical, and usage needs
• Uncover current and future needs
• Save time by providing the team with a constant point of reference during the BI software solution selection phase as well as in the implementation phase

4 Types of Assessments to Identify Your Business Intelligence Requirements

The following four assessments highlight the areas an organization must focus on for its BI requirements gathering exercise:

Business Assessment

A business assessment ensures your business is well equipped with what it needs to deliver on your goals. It provides a guideline to help you scale your business in a way that is smart and strategic. The secret to conducting useful business assessments that provide actionable insights is to analyze appropriate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).KPIs keep business objectives at the forefront. They are the metrics that provide answers to the right questions or monitor the health of the areas of your business in consideration. With the right selection of KPIs you evaluate how a BI solution needs to address pain points experienced in the past, how should it deliver on the current needs and finally how will it scale to cover future wants.Since KPIs also play a pivotal role in keeping your business intelligence projects on track, we have created a KPIs for BI Template that will assist you in the exercise of choosing the right ones.

Data Assessment

The truthfulness of the analysis is directly proportional to the integrity of the data. A data assessment report can identify data quantity, complexity and active versus inactive data – critical for project scoping. It includes various quality checks which provide information on data relevancy, business data readiness, target readiness and gap analysis.Data Assessment must also confirm that the data is applicable to the KPIs. You may have the right KPIs defined in the Business Assessment Report but if there’s a mismatch between your data and KPIs, you need to relook at your data. Finally, a thorough data assessment will also reduce unnecessary infrastructure costs and the complexity of your new system – ensuring better operational efficiencies.

User Group Assessment

Business intelligence is a process that sees many users participate at various stages starting with data transformation performed by technical users and ending with reports or dashboards consumed by business users. Each group has specific requirements from the BI solution. Profiling them helps in understanding their consumption and usage patterns which comes in handy while selecting and designing dashboards.

Security Assessment

When there are multiple users and datasets involved in the project, it’s crucial to know in advance how the interactivity will take place, how will users be authenticated, what is the back-end architecture, and where is the solution going to be integrated. Finally, if there are any security checkpoints already in place that needs to be considered, or if any extra security checks need to be put in place.

Once these assessments are done, you will be in a comfortable position to create realistic timelines with your BI implementation team.

Business Intelligence Requirements Gathering Guidelines

To make the business intelligence requirement gathering exercise easier for you, here are two templates you could refer to. They should provide you with a detailed guideline to create a comprehensive BI Requirements Report to work with. We recommend the same to our clients before we jump on our first call with them to discuss dashboard implementations. It helps us as a team to significantly reduce the turnaround time.

Business Intelligence Requirements Examples

When setting up a Business Intelligence (BI) system, the following are examples of specific requirements that an organization might encounter:

Real-Time Sales Dashboard:

• Requirement: A retail company needs a real-time sales dashboard that pulls data from point-of-sale systems across all store locations. The dashboard should update every 15 minutes, allowing regional managers to monitor sales performance instantly and make informed decisions on inventory management.

Automated Financial Reporting:

• Requirement: A financial services firm requires automated monthly financial reports that consolidate data from multiple sources, including accounting software and external financial databases. These reports should be scheduled to run automatically at the beginning of each month and be distributed to stakeholders without manual intervention.

Customer Segmentation Analysis:

• Requirement: A marketing team needs the ability to segment customers based on purchasing behavior, demographics, and interaction history. The BI system must provide tools to create and analyze these segments, helping the team tailor marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement.

Compliance Monitoring:

• Requirement: A healthcare provider must ensure that its BI system adheres to HIPAA regulations. This includes maintaining audit trails for data access, encrypting sensitive patient information, and restricting access to authorized personnel only.

Inventory Optimization:

• Requirement: A manufacturing company needs a BI tool that can analyze inventory levels in real-time, predict stock shortages, and optimize order quantities based on historical data and demand forecasts. This ensures production efficiency and reduces excess inventory costs.

Employee Performance Tracking:

• Requirement: The HR department requires a dashboard that tracks employee performance metrics, such as productivity, attendance, and project completion rates. This data should be easily accessible to managers for performance reviews and to identify areas for employee development.

Data-Driven Decision Making for Product Development:

• Requirement: A software company needs a BI system that integrates customer feedback, usage data, and market trends to guide product development. The system should provide insights into which features are most valued by users, helping prioritize the product roadmap.

Cross-Platform Data Integration:

• Requirement: An e-commerce business needs to integrate data from its online store, CRM system, and social media platforms into a unified BI dashboard. This allows the business to track customer journeys across platforms and analyze the effectiveness of different marketing channels.

Energy Consumption Monitoring:

• Requirement: A utility company requires a BI system to monitor energy consumption patterns across different regions. The system should provide real-time data on usage spikes, helping the company manage load distribution and plan for peak demand periods.

Vendor Performance Evaluation:

• Requirement: The procurement department needs a BI tool to evaluate vendor performance by analyzing delivery times, cost efficiency, and product quality. This data will be used to make informed decisions about future vendor contracts and negotiations.

These examples demonstrate how BI requirements translate into actionable solutions that address specific business needs, helping organizations leverage data for better decision-making and operational efficiency.

Let’s chart your BI roadmap together!

Whether your project needs to be completed next week or next year, our team of Professional Services Consultants can help you meet your data analytics objectives faster, accelerating your time to value.

Choosing to opt for consultancy services helps you navigate your options and sets you up for success. Irrespective of how unique your deployment and environment are, whether you are implementing our business intelligence platform for the first time or migrating from another vendor to Dundas BI.