Business intelligence (BI) solutions must meet business needs to sustain sponsorship, funding, and support. However, meeting the business needs should not come at the expense of providing an infrastructure with the controls, alerts and workflow processing reports that increase the trust that the users have in the solution and underlying data. These types of controls, alerts and reports often fall victim to meeting tight budgets and timeframes of BI projects.

BI solutions and applications should be embarked upon to meet a business need. Over the years insurance companies' needs have included reducing claim costs through management of claim adjuster workloads, better pricing decisions through monitoring the application of base rates and scheduled modifications, and optimization of producer channels through more complete information.

An empirical mark of a successful BI program is that it generates the demand from the business users for more data and new capabilities. As the questions of today get answered, the questions of tomorrow are uncovered. Many companies begin their journey by developing roadmaps for their BI program that includes the types of benefits they are looking to achieve, when they will achieve those benefits, and how they will build out their BI capabilities in an iterative fashion while delivering upon those needs along the way. Often, these roadmaps will even show the points at which specific departments and executives will benefit.