If your organization is considering a BI initiative, but unsure of whether to pull the trigger, rate your answers to the following open questions, with "0" meaning "non-existent" and "10" meaning "extremely high."  High cumulative points indicates that BI holds good potential value for you.

(1) To what extent is our information technology a strategic asset and not just a cost of doing business?
(2) To what extent does our success depend on extracting knowledge from a large amount of reasonably complex data?
(3) Just how much existing operational data (GigaBytes, TeraBytes) do we have and how quickly is it growing?
(4) How complex is our operational data? (The more complex it is, the more BI can help us see through it).
(5) Among our existing resources, such as reports, dashboards, spreadsheets, or documents, to what extent are they, and will they remain, inadequate as our foundation for extracting insight from our data? 
(6) Do we have an adequate IT infrastructure (staff and systems) to build BI internally?
(7) How ready are we to support outsourced technical work?
(8) Do we have adequate infrastructure to provide ongoing technical support for a delivered BI solution?
(9) How much buy-in can we gain from potential user-stakeholders who currently make decisions without BI?