I'm excited to kick off what will soon follow - a long series of thoughts about my experience leading Business Intelligence teams, growing BI maturity across organizations, and everything that comes with it. We'll aim to cover everything from best practices and industry standards to lessons through failure and persevering through to success.

Business Intelligence comes in many shapes and sizes. What might work for one organization might not work for another. Maturity differs and implies a different approach that suits the organization's needs. The solution is not always to purchase a BI tool like Tableau. Sometimes all that's needed is a bit of governance. Other times it's a vision and strategy to that vision. Maybe there's not even a need to purchase a BI tool (the first step might be to mature analytics - we'll get to that). The possibilities are endless.

Whatever the path chosen, the content is deep. There are layers and layers to uncover and think through. It might seem like a simple decision but if not thought out carefully, you'll end up at the bottom of Kilimanjaro instead of at the bottom of the rolling hills of Windows XP (you know which background I'm talking about).

My goal is to get you to understand the puzzle that we're looking at so you focus on putting the right pieces together instead of questioning if there even is a puzzle.

We always hear that BI is about turning data into actionable insights - and that's true but what does that mean? To me, it's about giving the business the ability to look itself into the mirror and know why it's making the decision it makes. Let's look at Business Intelligence through the mirror and figure out what to do.

Pierre