Developing an Enterprise Business Intelligence Capability: The Norfolk Southern Journey

Although many IT and business managers today may be lured into business intelligence (BI) investments by the promise of predictive analytics and emerging BI trends, creating an enterprise-wide BI capability is a journey that takes time. This article describes Norfolk Southern Railway’s BI journey, which began in the early 1990s with departmental reporting, evolved into data warehousing and analytic applications, and has resulted in a company that today uses BI to support corporate strategy. We describe how BI at Norfolk Southern evolved over several decades, with the company developing strong BI foundations and an effective enterprise-wide BI capability. We also identify the practices that kept the BI journey “on track.” These practices can be used by other IT and business leaders as they plan and develop BI capabilities in their own organizations.