Sidebar: What Users Want From Business Intelligence

By Julia King

December 22, 2003 12:00 PM ET

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Computerworld - At Landstar System Inc., a transportation logistics company in Jacksonville, Fla., designated power users from the business provide ongoing help desk support to other users when business intelligence problems arise. The reason is simple, says Bob Leo, director of data management and administration at Landstar. "For any BI effort to be worth it, you have to have the business community take ownership of the process."
On the IT side, technology professionals are responsible for understanding exactly what business users require from a business intelligence system. This means understanding the kinds of business questions they need to answer and the kinds of data that will generate that information.
"Some of our challenge in IT has been being able to speak to users in business terms, which is very key to the success of a business intelligence project," says Leo. "We in IT can talk about dimensions and measures and columns and building cubes, but we've also had to learn how to adapt our terminology in the requirements-gathering process to talk about what the users do every day," he says.

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