Practical advice I came across from Alan Duncan at the London GartnerBI event.
This resonates with my time as a business user at Hilton. Luckily the SI Sapient and our oen IT team applied these principles.
It also highlights the role of self-service BI to help business users find out what it is they need to analyse and visualise. They soon find out if it's important and if not move on.
Working with IT it can help spec the formal managed reporting & analytics project
It takes a shift of mindset to develop a business-oriented narrative. To connect with the business stakeholder on their terms, you need to define a proposition that identifies and articulates: The business problem to be solved and the benefits that will accrue; The specific and measurable outcomes that will show the benefits have been achieved; A recipient stakeholder that cares about the outcome. Only when you’ve got these three things is is worth moving onto the questions of “what are we going to develop, and how are we going to build it”. Data and analytics leaders must set aside their desire to share with business leaders all the details of how the work gets done. Sorry folks, but business leaders don’t care how the work gets done – that’s your job!