BI teams face various technical and project management challenges on deployments. Here are the top BI challenges, with advice on how to address them.

As businesses of all sizes rush to make sense of the growing volumes of data they're collecting, they face a variety of business intelligence challenges that complicate efforts to make BI processes productive, effective and useful.

These challenges are shaped by multiple factors, including diverse data infrastructures, data management issues, new types of BI capabilities and varying levels of data literacy in the workforce. On the one hand, BI teams must ensure that proper data governance and security protections are put in place; on the other, they need to demonstrate how BI can benefit workers, including those who are less data literate.

Another set of BI challenges centers around changes in the ways that business intelligence tools are used in organizations to guide business decisions.

"Traditional BI typically involves curated data and applications driven by IT," said Porter Thorndike, principal product manager at Cloud Software Group's IBI division. The traditional approach provides information to business users via BI dashboards, reports and portals with well-defined workflows, Thorndike said. In contrast, modern BI initiatives are often driven by business units using self-service BI tools to hunt for insights and create data visualizations, dashboards and reports themselves.

In many cases, the challenges start with getting approval and funding for a business intelligence program and developing a solid BI strategy that meets business requirements and can deliver the promised ROI. In addition to conventional querying and reporting, BI strategies often need to incorporate mobile BI, real-time BI and analytics, augmented analytics and other specialized applications. That further increases the deployment and management challenges.

As they address all the issues, BI and data managers need to strike the right balance between self-service agility and good governance. Faster time to insight can provide a competitive advantage. But that needs to be balanced against data security and privacy concerns and the risk that business users might perpetuate inaccurate findings. As Thorndike put it, "Is the speed at which those insights are generated worth acting upon knowing that some of the insights could be faulty?"

Here's a more detailed look at the top business intelligence challenges for enterprises, plus advice from BI practitioners on how to avoid and overcome them.