It is easy to make generalizations in justifying a Business Intelligence System. Commonly used are:

• Saves money
• Helps enterprise to be more competitive
• Have informed decisions
• Improve productivity

and many others.

To face the critics of your BI system, quantify and provide specifics for your statements. For example, instead of just saying, it saves money, illustrate how the BI system saves money. If the pain point of your organization, for instance, is that one does not have a central repository of customer information so it takes accounting X amount of time creating an invoice because each time an invoice is created, one has to create a spreadsheet, getting information from multiple sources. It is effective to show how saving the time of accounting and billing the customer faster provides X amount of savings per month. As part of your justification, provide an estimate for the potential increase in receivables per month then multiply by the monetary amount of the average customer transaction.

A BI system that is aligned with business objectives and is able to maintain its economic justification gets buy-in and continuous support from the enterprise.

The concept of multidimensional cube is a good way to help users understand how they may want to query the multidimensional database or create OLAP reports. The dimensions of a cube are stored in a database table.

The data cube in the diagram below is composed of there dimensions: Customer, Product and Time.

This cube would allow query BY customer, BY time and BY product. Hence, sample query could be selecting a customer BY time and BY Product.

Additional dimensions (e.g. sales territory, sales person, etc) increase the size of the cube geometrically.