The most important issue is planning a BI project is identifying business benefits in the short and long term. Successful BI project is not a dynamic dashboard with colors and graphs, successful BI project is a tool that reveals the hidden value of enterprise data and helps decision makers make business decisions that will assist achieving the organization's business goals.

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Exposing the information by clear visuals is an important element. This is the final product, but the essence of the project is creating the decision support data.

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Getting the data into a central database, with data model that represents the major business issues, a model that will serve as a common repository for providing an integrated data source for any type of presentation and analysis, this if the main challenge.

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At first glance it seems simple. All the information from all systems is available, all you need to do is read the data and display it.

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But the reality is much more complex.

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The data in the organization databases is planned and organized in order to enable a machine to manage business processes and dataflow. The BI Challenge is transferring this data to something that human will see understand and use it for decision making.

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Such a task, without proper approach probably will exceed time and budget, and will eventually fail.

It is important before you start a BI project to know all the implications, understand the possible outcomes and financial implications. It is important to make sure you receive business benefits from the initial stages in order to understand the capabilities and get the right business decisions and decide whether and how to proceed with the project.

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It is important to set achievable targets for given budget and time. Plan the project so that you get business value from first stage and you will be able at any point in time to decide whether and how to proceed.