Avoid the project pitfalls of BI


5 tips for Business Intelligence project success

July 2007  Print

Why implement Business Intelligence (BI)? According to Mike Biere, successful BI projects enable employees to spend less time gathering and analysing data and more time in the actual decision making process. This means that BI increases the ability to formulate and execute plans.

BI solutions are designed to pull information from different sources, combining it together in an environment and then displaying it in one form or another.

Business Intelligence is definitely shifting from being a tool that is only accessible to large corporate and enterprise-level clients to one that SMBs are embracing.

"Companies now realize they can get more out of the data assets they have collected. The growth is also a reflection of the fact that IT systems in the midmarket are quite mature," Speyer said. "BI is relatively less well adopted, compared to other types of applications."

Chances are that you will be involved in a Business Intelligence (BI) project at some time or another, so here are 5 tips to help you out.

 

One

Get buy-in before you start

A panel at a recent BI conference concluded that the most crucial step in any BI project is to secure the acceptance of the end-users, and we’re not just talking about the buy-in from the guys in the IT Department.

Buy-in from the key business end-users is very important. Acceptance and user-adoption of a BI tool is one of the more complicated aspects of a BI project to address because of the slight disconnect between the departmental perceptions of what BI is all about (see next tip).

A great way to get buy-in is to inform people of the actual benefits of a system in their terms. Don’t talk about how great your 100% dense multidimensional data cube is at building XML-based queries from eight different sources. Talk about actual business and personal benefits such as time savings.

A recent study conducted in Europe found that employees were wasting about 15% of their time just searching for information. Additionally lack of accurate, consistent and complete information was identified by the majority of respondents as being a barrier to making a good decision.

"The study also finds 54% of respondents claiming lack of accurate, consistent and complete information as the biggest barrier to making good decisions. Currently, they have to rely too much on experience, rather than good information to make decisions."

 

Two

Make sure the business issues are identified and addressed

"Don't start with a data warehouse or analytics engine. Start with understanding the business issue," Forrester's Evelson advises in a recent CIO article on BI.

IT tends to think of BI in terms of the solution; data mining, online analytical processing, multidimensional analysis and graphical dashboards. Conversely, actual business users of BI solutions think of it in far more generic terms, an aid to decision making. This mismatch of perceptions can mean that IT pours resources into a solution that does not effectively answer the right business problem.

Like a lot of other IT related projects, BI suffers from the problem of managing expectations. A study on UK Business Intelligence projects found that a whopping 87 percent of BI projects are failing to meet their original objectives. This high failure rate has led to a lot of disappointment with BI project, especially after 85 percent of those interviewed implemented BI in order to improve management decision making.

 

Three

Take off the technology goggles

Don’t limit your focus to just the technical solution. Make sure that the underlying business and data problems have been identified and are being addressed by the proposed solution; otherwise you run the risk of project disappointment.

As in most IT related projects, focusing on technical solutions too early can pigeon-hole a solution. While this may be quicker, the major risk of this methodology is that underlying business issues may not be uncovered and more effective solutions overlooked.

Additionally, beware the simple solution for BI projects. Galen Gruman writes in CIO that smaller-scale BI projects which involve simple graphical dashboards often have up to 80% of the costs of larger BI projects. This is due to the similarity of the work required to set up the reporting analytics and data integration on the back-end.

 

Four

Manage the project effectively

The inherent complexity found in a lot of BI projects is quite large and as mentioned previously, even scaling back the scope doesn't produce the cost/time benefits that one would expect.

All projects carry with them some sort of risk and it is important that they are managed effectively. Due to the heightened risks found in BI projects, as highlighted by the high project failure rates, it is a good idea to sink enough resources to ensure the project is managed effectively.

A recent study on UK Business Intelligence projects found that "...nearly a quarter [of BI projects] are going over budget..." This is a pretty big number and the risk of cost blowouts is more effectively controlled with good project management.

 

Five

Finally, get the techie skills!

Consolidation of BI vendors through mergers and acquisitions means that there are now solid 3rd party BI offerings out there. However, the price tag associated with licensing costs for these tools may dissuade some companies from adopting, especially in the SMB market were a lot of growth in BI is meant to occur.

For those that go down that path, custom development is always an option but care must be taken to make sure that you have all the relevant technical skills. BI solutions are inherently complex because they pull information from different sources, combining it together in an environment and then displaying it in one form or another. Therefore the skills needed for an end-to-end solution will cross the border between many different products.

 

The DDLS BI offering

DDLS has partnered with BI solutions providers to bring you the Business Intelligence Boot camp. Written and presented by industry experts, this intensive five-day workshop gives professional developers the information and hands-on experience they need to deliver state-of-the-art, integrated reporting and analytics solutions using Microsoft Business Intelligence solutions.

The Business Intelligence Boot camp is an ideal starting point for any organisation looking to acquire the skills necessary for a BI project because it looks at several differnt Microsoft technologies and how they relate to Business Intelligence.