Give us just so much BI that we need

Gartner Analyst Bill Hostman says valuing Business Intelligence(BI) is not an exact science and often comes down to mindset, comparing BI to a college education:

"It's not easy to persuade someone to go to college based on a purely financial or numbers game, and the same thing goes [for] BI," Hostmann said. "You just have to believe that BI is absolutely essential for you as an organization to investment, that this is a fundamental core competency that you have to have."

Hostmann suggests this question - "Do you have the information that you need to manage your business?" – as a metric for measuring user satisfaction.

I say BI software often floods a user with too much information [he hardly ever needs but pays for] that his decisions often veer off-track. Need to twist that question a bit – “How little information you need to effectively manage your business?”

In that you get an effective metric to compute ROI from BI software. Make users pay less since they get less. Need I tell you they are staring at a recession…?