Part 2: Determining Your User Personas

In the previous chapter, we talked about determining your use cases.

Determining user personas is an important step in the business intelligence software buying journey because you must understand for whom you are purchasing the software. Organizations will tell us that the end user is simply the “sales department,” but the sales department is often just one end user. This is why we recommend creating user personas, which will empower you to determine the absolute best business intelligence solution for your company.

What Is a User Persona?

For the purpose of this eBook, we are defining a user persona as the description of a stakeholder and end user that captures the stakeholder’s skills, expectations, behavior patterns, and environment.

Build a list of user personas for each BI use case your organization identifies. In most cases, you will have multiple user personas but typically no more than three or four. If you do find yourself listing more than four personas for each use case, consolidate your user persona lists.

Examples of BI User Personas

Here are suggestions for types of personas you can use in defining your organization’s BI user personas.

Power Users

Power users are those who are technically savvy and are often able to write SQL code. These users are able to query databases and build reports.

Knowledge Worker

This user is your everyday employee who is responsible for managing or executing a process. These users require access to data to do their jobs as a natural extension of their roles. They will need to access data in order to perform tasks.

Decision Makers

Decision makers are the users in your organization that need to see big picture snapshots of data. These users love dashboards and reports that are easy to digest so that they can make decisions based upon the data they are viewing. Decision makers do not want to conduct analyses or build reports, and need quick access to the key takeaways from the data.

Occasional Users

These users are employees, customers, vendors or partners. These users require specific information on an occasional basis.

In the next chapter, we will talk about how determining your usage profile helps in business intelligence.