Business intelligence (BI) is often misunderstood as being about dashboards — colorful charts that look impressive in a meeting but don't actually change any decisions. Done well, BI is the opposite: it starts with a specific question the business needs answered, and works backward to the data and visualization needed to answer it.
A useful starting discipline is to list the recurring decisions your business makes — which products to restock, which customers to follow up with, whether a marketing spend is paying off — and ask what data would make each decision easier or more confident. This produces a much shorter, more useful list of dashboards than starting from "what data do we have" and building reports around it.
It's also worth resisting the urge to track everything at once. A single well-designed dashboard that a manager checks every week and genuinely acts on is worth more than ten dashboards nobody opens after the first month. Start narrow, prove the value, then expand what you track.
Finally, BI is only as good as the data feeding it. Dashboards built on top of inconsistent, manually entered data will simply make bad information look more authoritative. Often the highest-value early investment isn't the dashboard itself, but cleaning up how data enters the system in the first place.