Tips for implementing a BI project

I am speaking at AICPA in Las Vegas on Business Intelligence. My talk is supposed to be a "lessons learned" kind of case study on using BI. I developed 11 tips when rolling out a BI solution. Some of these may look very familiar:

Tip 1: When deciding what to show in your BI tools, use a balanced score card approach.
Balanced scorecards provide a nice framework for thinking about developing useful metrics

Tip 2 : Select right hardware.
We needed a “Data Appliance” like Netezza. Feel free to overbuy. Your future self will thank you.

Tip 3: Take your time building requirements.
Figure out who is going to use the data and for what. What are needs going to be a year from now? Three years from now?

Tip 4: Conduct a data quality audit.
Check for missing data, unusual variability, unusual stability

Tip 5: Make your data warehouse responsible for fixing data quality problems.
Don’t try to build in work-arounds. You will have bought yourself a bunch of maintenance headaches. Let the guys who are supposed to give you clean data do their jobs.

Tip 6: Provide some context for each metric.
Show trends, goals, and/or min-max for each metric. This will allow the exec to decide if some metric is worth further attention.

Tip 7: Enable drill down on your charts (but don’t overdo it).
When an exec sees something “anomalous” they are going to want to see if they can figure out what is going on. Computer users are trained to clicking on things they are curious about. Leverage this behavior.

Tip 8: Avoid being “flashy”and cool.
Keep your charts simple and redundant. Allow your audience to learn how to consume your BI quickly, not be impressed with your teams programming skills.

Tip 9: Conduct 1-on-1 sessions with senior execs to ensure that they found the BI tools useful and informative. Adoption of these things is much harder than technical implementation. Do anything you can do to drive adoption

Tip 10: Choose a software package for ease of integration.
Time spent integrating is not worth the loss of strategic use of the data. Remember, the time you take to get things working right has a cost to the business.
All of the major BI vendors have very similar functionality and differences are not likely to have any impact on business decision making

Tip 11: Be ruthlessly simple about what you metrics you show. Complexity is your enemy.
Strive for few, but very meaningful metrics. Too often, you are going to want to create complex reports. Fight the urge. They will never be looked at. In this context, I will always sacrifice completeness for simplicity.