What BI Is, What BI Isn’t and Do I Need BI?
By 
What BI is…
There are many definitions of Business Intelligence (BI); the easiest one is the right information to the right person at the right time in the right way. This is my least favorite because it implies a factor of luck, having to be in the right place at the right time. Of course, there are others such as the one written by H.P. Luhn in 1958 “The objective of the system is to supply suitable information to support specific activities carried out by individuals, groups, departments, divisions, or even larger units… To that end, the system concerns itself with the admission of acquisition of new information, its dissemination, storage, retrieval, and transmittal to the action points it servers.” And the one I use most often: Integration of data from disparate source systems to optimize business usage and understanding through a user-friendly interface.
What BI isn’t…
BI isn’t reporting, it isn’t analytics, it isn’t data warehousing and it isn’t dashboards. All of these things individually do not make a BI program, but put them together and that is exactly what BI is. BI enables each of these. BI is greater than the sum of its parts. You may question why BI enables data warehousing, but the truth is that you don’t need a data warehouse if you don’t have an intention of analyzing data or reporting from it. BI is an industry and a skill set, but BI isn’t the group you go to to provide you the knowledge or intelligence about your organization. Quite the contrary, BI allows those groups to function more efficiently. If you want to find an ROI for your BI program, go to the folks that know the data and have to complete herculean tasks to get reports out each month, there’s your ROI.
Do you need BI?
If your organization uses data to make decisions then the answer is yes. If your organization wants to use data to make decisions then the answer is yes. The degree to which you have to invest and create your BI program is what should vary. Every BI program is different because every organization is different (see my post on the BI ecosystem), this is not a one size fits all, if you’ve seen one BI program you have seen one BI program. There are critical similarities, such as the need for a data warehouse, ETL (in some form) and a method of report distribution; but the rest is the art of good BI.
