There are critical success factors on the road to the cloud for business intelligence.

In my previous Industry Insight, I outlined certain important points to consider when defining a cloud business intelligence (BI) strategy. In summary, this came down to having a clear understanding of the business case (and associated benefits), as well as the business use cases (to understand where this would be applied). At this point, if you had gone through this process, hopefully as part of a coordinated, managed project, you would most typically be right in the middle of the hype cycle of the project. At this stage of the process, everyone is really excited about the expected benefits identified in the strategy, such as improved performance, reduced costs, scalability, agility, improved planning, financial forecasting and costing.