BI professionals spend a significant portion of their time trying to instill the discipline of datadriven performance management into their business partners. However, isn’t there something wrong with teaching someone else to fly when you’re still learning to walk? Few BI pros have a way to measure their BI performance quantitatively (46% do not measure BI performance efficiencies and 55% do not measure effectiveness). Everyone collects statistics on the database and BI application server performance, and many conduct periodic surveys to gauge business users’ level of satisfaction. But how do you really know if you have a high-performing, widely used, popular BI environment? For example, you should know BI performance

  • Efficiency metrics such as number of times a report is used or a number of duplicate/similar reports, etc
  • Effectiveness metrics such as average number of clicks to find a report and clicks within a report to find an answer to a question and many others
  • Metric attributes/dimensions such as users, roles, departments, LOBs, regions and others

Those who have implemented what Forrester calls "BI on BI" are in nirvana land reaping the following benefits such as ability to quantitatively support

  • Application and DBMS consolidations, migrations, and upgrades
  • BI maturity assessments
  • Future BI investment justification and business cases (FYI, our latest report on BI business cases best practices and real ROI data should be published next week)
  • Service-level agreements (SLAs) and chargebacks
  • And even incentive compensation justification

But creating BI on BI environment and infrastructure is easier said than done. Read the detailed report to find out best practices and where to look for help.