Understanding The BI User Community

Cognos.com Tip: Business intelligence standardization seeks to define and homogenize each of the many facets of the technology to enhance corporate understanding among user groups and functional disciplines within the organization. Make sure you recognize the various users and their particular needs. There are six general user groups:
·Executives
·Managers
·IT Administrators
·Professional Report Authors
·Suppliers and Customers
·Business Consumers

Executives, managers and business consumers make up fully ninety-five percent of the BI user community. The following characterizes each user and identifies their basic BI needs.

Executives are the key decision makers within the organization. Their influence spans the strategic and tactical operations of the business and they are the main drivers of most policy components. Their needs are somewhat unique compared to other users and include information regarding key metrics, function appropriate updates and status alerts, and secure access to information.

Managers comprise at least a quarter of the community and consist of the tactical-level executers of corporate policy and are responsible for directing most functional business area activities. Their broad functional responsibilities require individualized right of entry to many BI capabilities, including multi-dimensional data query (e.g. drill-down/through) for subtle informational kernels, user-friendly Web-based BI authoring, and, infrequently, analytical and performance measure management.

IT Administrators are a key BI user group, including information architects, technical support, and other IT professionals that configure, deploy and support the entire BI technology suite. This vital assemblage requires the complete range of BI access, functionality and control for all users. They also require vendor-provided systems and tools that possess ease of maintenance and infrastructure compatibility.

Professional report authors, also called ‘power users’, are expert authors that are the developer’s ‘users of choice’ for BI software, despite representing only five percent of users. They require advanced BI capabilities in the areas of report authoring tools, large-scale distribution ability, comprehensive BI capabilities for data sourcing and outputting, speed of data access, and capability response.

Business consumers are the rank and file members of the organization’s functional business area teams and share their basic needs with the supplier/customer group. Each group requires little interaction with the reports they are privy to, yet require the information to be presented clearly and succinctly.