Customers don’t know much about BI, but they know what they like

Presentation Summary

Aaron Walz and Beth Ladd, University of Illinois

With industry survey after survey showing staggeringly low rates of BI adoption, clearly one of our ongoing challenges is delivering BI solutions that our organizations will actually use. Complicating this is the difficulty of getting good requirements for BI projects: business users with little or no BI experience are at a loss to describe needs for information solutions they’ve never had. How can we deliver successful BI solutions given these challenges? At the University of Illinois, the use of prototypes has helped us to both validate ideas for new solutions, and to get detailed requirements for projects to build them. This presentation will describe the challenges often encountered and examples of the different ways prototypes can be used to help address them. Even where users don’t know much about BI, prototypes help uncover that they really do know what they like.