Ok, so you’re new business intelligence solution project is coming to an end. The developers have created a great new data warehouse and data marts are being designed as we speak. Your team is discussing training and user adoption strategies and then all of a sudden you have a meeting request from your vendor…”We’d like to meet with you to discuss your business intelligence plans for the future”.

You’re not alone if this type of scenario would catch you off guard. I wasn’t sure how to respond to such a request. We had barely had time to breathe since this project began, much less plan out how and when additional source systems would be brought into the business intelligence application. My team and I wondered..is it too early to have this type of meeting?

As I pondered, I recalled that just days earlier some stakeholders had inquired about data that was currently inaccessible because it hadn’t been migrated into a data warehouse. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but now I could see that even the users were forward-thinking. They were thinking of the great possibilities of our new business intelligence solution without any prompting and it seemed that they were running this race quicker than me.

So, my final conclusion is this: It is not too early to create a roadmap for your business intelligence solution, in fact, the sooner the better. I know how tempting it is to want to relax after such a major project, but once the users realize how powerful the new data is for them they are only going to want more. Don’t be reactive to such request, but take a proactive approach by planning your business intelligence roadmap early.