Enterprise BI Portals: The Heart and Soul of a Business Intelligence Program
An enterprise BI portal is an essential ingredient of any successful business intelligence program. It provides business users one-stop shopping for any BI asset throughout an enterprise and gives BI administrators a powerful tool for optimizing BI usage and rationalizing BI portfolios.
Key Takeaways
An enterprise BI portal enables business users to:
- Search for any BI asset throughout an enterprise.
- Use BI assets no matter which tool generated them without leaving the BI portal.
- View a home page that displays content based on role, department, or favorites.
- Improve data literacy by inspecting metadata attributes for every BI asset.
- Contribute “tribal knowledge”, such as comments and ratings.
- Gain confidence in the trustworthiness of BI content by using certified BI assets.
An enterprise BI portal enables BI administrators to:
- Gain line-of-sight visibility into BI activity and optimize BI environments.
- Track usage by user, department, tool, report, and any number of other attributes throughout the enterprise.
- Manage the lifecycle of reports and dashboards, paring unused or underused assets.
- Abstract content from BI tooling so changes or updates to BI tools or content doesn’t impact business users.
- Reduce the number of BI tools to a manageable number.
- Provide effective BI governance through the entire lifecycle of a BI asset.
Recommendations
- Implement an enterprise portal, especially if your company has multiple BI tools or is afflicted with report sprawl.
- Investigate enterprise BI portals from Metrics Insight, Zenoptics, or Digital Hive to see which provides the best fit for your organization.
- Roll out the enterprise BI portal one department at a time, recruiting business champions in each to coordinate the implementation and tailor the environment to their colleagues.
- Provide training and hand-holding to get business users used to the idea of going to one place to access any and all BI reports and dashboards.