How to gather business intelligence reporting requirements from BI users

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How to gather business intelligence reporting requirements from BI users

How to gather business intelligence reporting requirements from BI users

Phil Simon, Founder, Phil Simons Systems

Are there any readily available reporting requirement templates of questions to ask for gathering reporting requirements from end-users during the evaluation process for a new business intelligence (BI) initiative?

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I steer away from reporting requirement templates for BI projects and rely on fundamental questions such as the following:

What are you trying to measure?
How often do you measure this?
How good is the data being measured?
Why are you measuring this?
How is this measurement linked to employee, sales or organizational performance?
Is there a better way to measure this?

I find that choosing a new BI product is an excellent time to look at the basics. Merely replicating the old system with a new technology is a recipe for project management disaster.

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- business
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- reporting
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This was first published in July 2009

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