How Do You Measure Business Intelligence Performance?

Measuring BI performancesince people have already lost interest.
A question often posed by professionals wantingIn terms of usability, people suggest that as long
to know how they can tell if their BI solution isas the system is being used and is easy enough
performing well: How do you Measure Businessto use, then it is performing. But just because a
Intelligence Performance? There are of courseteam is using BI a lot, does this mean it performs
many ways to measure performance (take abetter than a team that only use it occasionally?
look at our previous post, 30 BusinessOr if your system is particularly simple to use,
Performance Indicators you can (and should)does this make it a better than a system that
Measure") which generally boil down to trackingrequires help from the IT department?
the quantified monetary benefits against theQuality could refer to the quality of data used
system cost. It is also worth noting that eachwith the system, the quality of the system itself
industry is different and there are measurementor the quality of the results derived from the BI
parameters that are often industry or functionanalysis. Data quality can highly affect the
specific.performance of the BI system as well as the
Some performance measuresoutcome, placing it as a strong measure of
Generally, the most common way of measuringbusiness intelligence performance.
business performance requires measurement ofReliability - everyone wants a reliable BI solution.
some type of goal or KPI, whether it is an initialSomething that will give consistent and accurate
or newly formed one. This normally ties in nicelyresults. A BI solution could be considered as
with measuring ROI. Measurement parameterswell-performing if it always delivers what the user
could include, but are not limited to: scalability,wants. But this measure alone is probably not
usability, reliability, quality and adoption/usage.enough to quantify the performance level of a
Before implementing a BI solution there arebusiness intelligence system...
normally some key organizational objectives andFinal thoughts
KPIs that have been put in place to workIt has been suggested that at the end of the
towards. Measuring business intelligenceday, the success of a BI initiative should be
performance based on successful completion ofmeasured in terms of value creation: whether the
these goals alone is perhaps a little too rigid, butBI solution gives the business the tools to get as
certainly using them as indicators of BImuch value out of their data as possible, while at
performance can be helpful. ROI, often closelythe same time providing valuable insight that can
related to an organization's goals, can be used asbe applied to leverage enough money to cover
an easily quantifiable measure of BI success,the cost of implementing the BI solution and
making it perhaps the "strongest" measuremake a profit. What we drew from our research
available.into this topic is that there is no standard way of
Adoption/usage has the potential be a really goodmeasuring BI performance: each organization has
indicator, if able to be correctly quantified. Adifferent ways of measuring performance and
common problem with this type of parameter isquantifying success. It is highly likely that
that it's sometimes quantified too late on in theorganizations use a combination of several of the
measurement process to be able to make anyabove measures, as well as others not mentioned
constructive changes - for example, if very fewhere, to draw conclusions about the performance
people are using your BI system, but you don'tlevels of their BI solution.
know why, it's more a case of too little too late