Business data continues to grow rapidly in volume, velocity, and variety. At the same time, changing customer requirements, competition, and innovation are driving rapid changes in business requirements and supporting business processes.
Decision makers at every level of an organization require accurate, current, and cohesive business information to generate actionable Business Intelligence (BI), analytics, and insights for effective tactical and strategic decision-making.
Business Intelligence is essential to organizational agility and competitiveness.
Simply stated, organizations that effectively use data and act on the resulting business intelligence are better positioned to respond to change and create business value.
Most organizations recognize the value of business data. Unfortunately, many are not yet realizing its full potential. The challenge is often not the enabling technology. The challenge is defining the right business intelligence requirements and translating business decision-making needs into clear, actionable requirements.
Business intelligence requirements analysis differs significantly from requirements analysis for transactional systems. It requires business analysts to apply a business-oriented, non-technical set of analysis skills, techniques, and methods to identify the information, metrics, data, and decision logic required by business users.
Traditionally, many organizations approached BI primarily from a technical perspective. Effective BI solutions, however, begin with rigorous analysis of the requirements for business intelligence from the perspective of business decision makers and subject matter experts.
The following 10 Business Intelligence Requirements Analysis Questions are among the questions most frequently asked by our clients and participants in our business and systems analysis training programs.
These FAQs provide practical guidance for improving the quality, speed, and effectiveness of your organization’s BI requirements process and for developing clearer, more complete business intelligence requirements.
#1: What is the difference between Big Data and Business Intelligence?
Definitions of Big Data and Business Intelligence (BI) vary considerably across the IT industry. However, several key distinctions between Big Data and BI are especially important in connection with business intelligence requirements analysis.
Three concepts are typically associated with Big Data: Volume, Velocity, and Variety.
- Volume represents the sheer amount of digital data generated within an organization, as well as externally generated data that is relevant or useful to the organization.
- Velocity represents the speed at which data is generated internally and externally, together with an organization’s ability to identify, consume, process, and use the data for decision-making.
- Variety recognizes that digital data comes in many forms, including text, images, geospatial coordinates, structured data, and other formats.
Big Data, very simply defined, encompasses the tools, techniques, and technologies used to identify, capture, and process the volume, velocity, and variety of digital data.
Business Intelligence, very simply defined, is the ability to create value from that data through better and faster decisions, actionable insights, and improved business understanding. In this context, BI can be viewed as a business-value-oriented application of the broader Big Data concept.
#2: What is the difference between a business requirement and a functional requirement?
A business requirement describes something the business needs to do or accomplish, such as a work activity or task required to operate the business on an ongoing basis. A business system functional requirement specifies how that business requirement is or could be supported through application software, business intelligence software, or other system functionality.
Business system functional requirements are a more detailed subset of business requirements from a user-functionality perspective. Functional requirements define the desired or required interactions between business users and the target application or BI solution.
#3: What is the difference between transactional business requirements and Business Intelligence (BI) requirements?
Transactional business requirements represent the business tasks and procedures an organization needs to perform. Business Intelligence requirements, by contrast, frequently represent the business questions that decision makers need to answer when performing work activities that require knowledge, judgment, analysis, and effective decision-making.
#4: What is the difference between a tactical BI requirement and a strategic BI requirement?
Tactical BI requirements support decision-making in the moment or over the short term, such as a daily product backorder report. Tactical requirements are typically driven by ongoing operational business processes. Strategic BI requirements support longer-term decision-making and often involve trends, patterns, goals, and objectives at the enterprise or business-unit level.
#5: What is the impact of BI requirements on Business Process Management (BPM)?
BI business requirements provide the metrics and key performance indicators necessary to identify potential gaps in business processes, including cycle times, defects, root causes, and patterns of behavior such as credit card fraud.
BI requirements can improve business process performance through rapid pattern recognition and matching. For example, a BI capability may enable an organization to suspend a credit card when unusual activity is detected. When BI requirements are defined in the context of business processes, organizations can generate important business insights and respond proactively to industry trends, regulatory changes, competition, and other business conditions.
#6: How are conceptual BI business requirements different from physical BI requirements?
Conceptual BI requirements represent the business and business-user perspective of a requirement. They are typically defined through business questions and depicted using logical data models, dimensional models, activity diagrams, data-access requirements, metric calculations, response-time requirements, structured versus unstructured queries, and ETL process maps.
Physical BI requirements represent how conceptual BI requirements will be implemented from a technical perspective. They are typically depicted through star schemas, physical database designs, source-system physical data models, and ETL transformation and interaction designs.
#7: What is the difference among a dimensional model, business data model, and star schema?
Dimensional models are used in BI business requirements analysis. Each dimensional model can depict and define a specific BI business requirement. Because dimensional models are business-intuitive and business-friendly, they provide an effective way to engage decision makers and subject matter experts in requirements analysis.
The business data model integrates BI business requirements and transactional requirements into a cohesive set of logical requirements. It can be used to validate requirements with subject matter experts through scenarios and to represent business rules and supporting data-oriented business rules.
A star schema represents one physical design option for a BI delivery solution. A star schema is typically implemented through a data mart, either as an independent data mart or as part of a cohesive, architected data warehouse solution.
#8: Is ETL a business process or a technical process?
Both. ETL - Extraction, Transformation, and Load - includes a business process analysis component typically performed by a business analyst and a technical design component typically performed by a technical designer or developer.
The role of a Business Analyst in BI requirements analysis includes defining the data required to support the BI business requirements, mapping that data to the appropriate source or sources, analyzing the underlying rules associated with the source data, and defining the scrubbing, standardization, and transformation needed to support the BI requirement.
The technical designer defines the technical solution required to extract data from source databases, scrub and transform the data, stage it as needed, and load it into the BI solution environment, such as an architected data warehouse or data mart.
#9: How do I identify, analyze, and define BI business requirements?
When gathering requirements for BI and analytics systems, it is essential to use model-driven analysis techniques to identify, analyze, define, and validate BI business requirements. Traditional text-based artifacts such as narratives, bullet lists, and indented outlines are often less effective for engaging business decision makers and subject matter experts in detailed analysis and can result in incomplete or ambiguous requirements.
Business Systems Analysis Tools and model-driven artifacts such as process maps, activity diagrams, business data models, dimensional models, state transition diagrams, and ETL maps help analysts filter noise and ambiguity and visually represent requirements clearly, concisely, and unambiguously.
Once the models and diagrams are stable and validated, the business requirements can be further distilled and refined into functional requirements.
#10: Can BI functional requirements be specified using the use case format?
Yes. A use case is an effective way to specify BI functional requirements for both transactional applications and business intelligence systems. It is important, however, to distinguish between analysis and documentation: a use case is primarily a structured approach for documenting a functional requirement rather than an analysis technique by itself.
Functional requirements are first identified and analyzed through models such as process maps, activity diagrams, business data models, dimensional models, state transition diagrams, and ETL maps using business and systems analysis techniques. After the BI business requirements are identified, analyzed, and validated through those models, they can be distilled and organized into the BI use case format.
Each BI functional requirement can then be specified through a separate use case. A BI use case is a business-oriented document that clearly defines the functional requirements associated with a BI business requirement. Accordingly, developing BI use cases is an important business analysis responsibility.
Today’s rapidly changing business environment requires Business Agility - the ability to respond quickly and effectively to changing customer needs, business conditions, data, and opportunities.
Meeting this challenge often requires transformative change and sustainable, ongoing improvement in business processes, organizational capabilities, information, and supporting technologies.
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