Critical Success Factors for BI Implementation

Business intelligence systems combine operational data with analytical tools to present complex and competitive information to planners and decision makers. The objective is to improve the timeliness and quality of inputs to the decision process.Today more and more organizations are turning towards BI for making better business decisions. BI implementations usually take very long time, consume a lot of resources and are also very expensive. They often do not bring expected results or do not fulfill vaguely defined expectations. And since turnover, is lower than in not so far past, it is more crucial to complete BI implementation with time and budget, well in order to improve business performance and to satisfy the sponsor of BI project. Thus making the study of Critical Success Factors in BI implementation is vital.This paper separately presents the results of a literature review and findings of AHP analysis on the critical success factors in the implementation of business intelligence. In AHP analysis, the CSFs have been prioritized by some of the BI experts and have been recognized as the most important critical success factors in the implementation of business intelligence including: Committed management support and Sponsorship, Clear business vision & Planning, Partnership between Business Community & IT, Adequate Budget, Change Management, Data quality & management issues. The comparison of the results of AHP analysis and literature review as two used ranking methods shows only one similar factor which is Business driven methodology & Project management .

Keywords:

business intelligence (BI) , critical success factors (CSFs) , BI Architecture