The CIO is responsible and accountable for providing the business with accurate information. All it takes is just one bad business decision to begin preparing for your not too distant job search. Involve the Head of BI in developing a BI tool strategy. BI related problems exist throughout all aspects of the enterprise. Some include: Large number of inaccurate business decisions are made using BI tools. Increasing inability of adapting legacy applications and systems to meet new BI needs. Proliferation of BI tools, redundant BI tools, e.g. applications with overlapping capabilities and similar purposes. Large number of data stores, multiple “sources of truth” for the same piece of data. Disengaged, unsatisfied, and unproductive business end users. The toy box is open; improve BI 1.0 (basic) capabilities and plan for BI 2.0 (advanced) capabilities to meet new demand. BI 2.0 capabilities (predictive, real-time, social and big data analytics) are being used more than ever. Organizations are adopting them as they provide significant opportunity to gain a competitive advantage. If the business isn’t demanding these capabilities now, they will soon. Plan for BI 2.0 capabilities now before the organization falls behind. Business users are becoming more tech-savvy and self-service oriented. IT needs to refocus its efforts on helping the business plan its information strategy, provide the business with more self-service tools, and continuously govern data to ensure high data quality. Don’t begin the BI journey with tools. Limit the modeling of BI tool benefits to an indicative business case. Although investing in BI tools can significantly reduce time to information (and therefore costs), the largest benefit are the insights obtained from accurate information, which are invaluable. Utilize use cases to facilitate the discussion between IT and business users. Use cases bridge communication gaps between IT and the business by outlining how specific tasks and scenarios map to different BI capabilities. Access Appendix: Use Cases & Analogies for a list of use cases for each BI capability. Empower end users throughout this project by allowing them to help IT select BI capabilities. This will help drive user adoption, satisfaction, and productivity since they will be working with these BI capabilities closely. Learn to embrace Microsoft Office. Integrate Excel with BI platforms to improve productivity and limit data duplication. Ensure Excel is only used to analyze data, not to create new data sets. All BI stakeholders should have influence over when IT should reassess BI tools. Continuously educate BI stakeholders on the BI market space. Investing time educating the business now saves more time latertrying to explain BI tools and the associated benefits.