Strategic Anchors for BI Strategy

This chapter shall familiarize you with the notion of “strategy” as such. It will provide insights into selected corporate and business strategies, starting with a crisp illustrative definition. Based on this understanding, we can strategically anchor the BI strategy with the business. The relevancy of corporate and business strategies for BI strategy must not be underestimated. If we do not sufficiently understand corporate and business strategies, including their objectives, level of ambitions, constraints, underlying assumptions, ways of working, terminologies, etc., we will hardly be able to discuss on a strategic level with our BI stakeholders and customers. And even more important, if we are not sufficiently equipped to participate in strategy discussions, how shall we convince our BI customers of our strategic BI value contribution? In the subsequent sub-chapters, we will discuss strategies, starting with the overarching corporate strategy. Due to the utmost importance of digital data for BI, we will detail “digital” strategy in a dedicated sub-chapter. Despite the relevance of digital data, it is by no means self-evident that companies are entirely mature across all domains. Within the sub-chapter finance strategy, we will broaden our view to understand possible changes within finance that might become opportunities or challenges for BI. During the last years, the relevancy and urgency to make significant improvements in sustainability and de-carbonization globally led to new needs of information provisioning and decision-making beyond corporate boundaries. Finally, we will provide insights into IT strategy and its cross-dependencies with BI. The tool kit itself for conducting the alignment will be described in Chap. 3 .