Introducing Business Intelligence appliances across the enterprise promises a
whole new level of data awareness for the staff base, which can promote new
efficiencies, transparencies and open new ways to target and serve customers.
But it still scares some.
Rolling out a quality BI product through the enterprise is not a task that can
be just assigned to a single silo group, it requires management and work groups
to commit to a long term project, it requires cross group co-operation, data
cleaning, data sharing and most importantly education. Resistance groups can
appear during the project when people feel the challenges out way the benefits
to them or that better reporting may threaten their own jobs; while others may
believe that company data should not be openly available.
To address these blocks and help get BI implementations off the ground more
quickly we have compiled a list of the top ten most common cultural issues with
BI project rollouts. We then asked the CEO of �Yellowfin Business Intelligence�,
Glen Rabie, to detail some of his own company�s frontline experiences with
enterprise BI and provide some solutions to alleviate the anxiety.
1. Complexity
(ACW) BI projects bring with them a new set of problems, company data is
generally is disparate systems that must now be linked, data is often
duplicated, data archiving and cleaning become more important, there are
political issues to solve, different hardware and opsys to consider, which
appliance to use and then the massive problem of educating people. What is it
about BI projects that make them so complex?
(Glen Rabie)
To be honest I do not actually think BI is that hard. The true complexity lies
in a number of items � one, actually defining the reports and data that people
want. Business analysis and really engaging the end users is critical. Two, data
cleansing � many applications allow users to enter junk � and the BI tool by
exposing data makes this data visible. Now you have to go back and clean all
that up! Lastly, you have the big bang approach. To many companies feel they
have only one shot at a BI project. In my view this is the wrong approach. Start
small and develop an incremental framework for delivering BI over time. Let you
users see what they are getting in stages and allow them to learn what they
actually need. And yes � give people time to improve business processes to clean
up that data.
2. Change
(ACW) This single issue can stall an IT project at any point, people fear change
or perceiving a threat to themselves, whether it results in more work for them
personally, greater scrutiny or worst case make their jobs irrelevant/obsolete.
Business Intelligence tools can result in a great deal of change � what are the
cultural impacts of this change?
(Glen Rabie)
Like any project there are always a bunch of people that just like doing it the
old way. Their power is derived from being the gate keeper to data � take that
away with a BI tool and you do change their working lives. The problem with the
BI project is that the gate keepers are critical to success. If they block or
attempt to de-rail the project then there is little chance of delivering a great
outcome.
There has been a tonne of articles written on the blocker so I will not delve to
deeply. However, another more subtle failure occurs when key users do not get
involved in a project due to other higher priority tasks. For BI to be
successful a series of sign-off steps need to occur to ensure data accuracy and
that what will be delivered will be of business value. If the key internal users
do not get involved and are just waiting for the delivery of the BI project �
the project will fail. And as usual the project team is held accountable. Drive
the change management and really make sure that all stakeholders are involved
and sign-off on every step within the project.
3. Investment
(ACW) Like any IT project, BI projects require investment in time, money and
human effort. The investment can seem too steep for the payoff for some.
Why do BI projects suffer from a perceived lack of ROI?
(Glen Rabie)
Well this is the recurring theme of BI. Business users want it, and yes it does
cost money and yet putting your finger on the value of information and how that
translates into accountable business benefits is incredibly difficult. The way
we like to think about it is simple � imagine working without internet access �
in the early days no conceivable benefit but now, who could imagine a knowledge
workers life without it? Sure you can continue to use excel and cobbled together
processes and save money by not going out and doing that BI project � but in the
long term will your business grow and thrive using that strategy? Probably not!
4. Just another Buzz phase
(ACW) Like many of the must have technologies that have propagated through
international corporations, from CASE tools in the 80's to WEB2.0 today. IT
managers fear Business Intelligence for the masses will have limited usefulness
and after the initial interest period will gather dust as people get on with
their established ways of working. What is you view on this?
(Glen Rabie)
I think the opposite will occur. If we look at the history of business computing
the persistent trend is to making users self sufficient. Lets take Excel as an
example. In the early days there were a handful of excel super heroes in an
organisation � now it is ubiquitous � everyone pretty much knows how to navigate
a spreadsheet. What is lacking from the spreadsheet, however, is the centralised
access to multiple data sources � and that is BI. People now are starting to
want direct access to their data without IT�s intervention. And that is a trend
that will not stop.
5. What�s wrong with Excel? attitude!
(ACW) Business and IT groups have become used to using the tools they have at
hand. Traditionally Excel is the application that people are quite comfortable
for most of their data manipulation and reporting. Do IT managers believe it is
sufficient for most staff?
(Glen Rabie)
Look it depends � I do not want to speak for all IT managers but I suppose a
large set would feel this way. There are a myriad of problems about using excel
� most of them not visible to management � and so in that sense not a problem.
Some of my favourites - How did users get their data that they are manipulating
in the first place? How much time do they spend putting it together and
re-running each month? It�s a great way to blow away a few days every month. How
accurate are their assumptions and calculations � and on it goes. Sure excel is
a great tool but it does not deliver consistent, auditable and replicatible BI �
end of story!
6. Measurement
(ACW) CIO's and business groups want to implement BI across the organization to
drive new efficiencies, but once that decision is made. The next phase is to
establish how to prove those efficiencies are occurring and that people are
embracing the technologies benefits.
(Glen Rabie)
As I mentioned earlier � measuring BI is incredibly hard to do. How do you
measure the value of email within a company? Why bother with PCs. Simply put -
BI tools are enablers � they will become critical business infrastructure.
7. Executive expectations
(ACW) Often a key driver for a BI project is the executive team�s desire for a
sexy (sic) business dashboard. Do many IT managers fear that the BI rollout will
not meet the lofty goals executive have envisioned.
(Glen Rabie)
The needs of the executive team differ vastly from those of operational users.
In my view it is best to deliver operational reporting first and then the
executive dashboards � problem for the guy paying the bills I know! However, the
reason for this is that if you deliver high level dashboards to the exec team if
the data is trending the wrong way they will want to drill down for answers from
their staff. If their staff do not have access to the same data at a lower level
� how will they respond? Well basically they will query the data � the numbers
can�t be right � that tool is wrong! So it is a fine line � our approach is to
deliver less data initially but deliver to all segments of the business, so that
the executives get sales data but so do the customer care people etc. That way
everyone has access to the same data; all be it from different views.
8. Organisation Size
(ACW) Some organisations bypass Business Intelligence, in the belief that their
smaller size or lower staff count will not benefit from business intelligence.
They assume that BI is only relevant for government or fortune 500 companies.
What is you take on this?
(Glen Rabie)
Well BI is for everyone. Running a large business or a small business is the
same. If you do not have total visibility of all your key metrics then you may
miss those critical opportunities or risks for your business. Sure you budgets
to implementing BI are going to differ but so then will the complexity of your
business. For example a small business is not going to have 100 different data
sources, which means getting something up and running will be a much lower cost
and the benefits to the business almost instantaneous.
9. Data security and management.
(ACW) Business groups may desire greater freedom of access to company data.
However, IT just see's the problems. Suddenly with the data aggregation, comes
the issues of data cleaning, data partitioning, extraction from disparate stores
and keeping the sensitive data access controlled.
(Glen Rabie)
Any BI project will come across security issues. If you have a robust BI
platform in place then security should not be a headache. My number one advice
in this area is to make sure that whatever tool you use it must have row level
security infrastructure. You have to be able to write a single report and share
that with many users in the confidence that they will only see the data that is
relevant to them.
10. Data Confidence
(ACW) IT having rolled out the enterprise wide BI project, now discovers that it
must manage the ongoing problem of data trust, people are making decisions that
affect the business daily and those decisions are being driven / supported by
the business intelligence tools. How will IT guarantee that the reports and
dashboard elements, can be trusted?
(Glen Rabie)
And now for the bombshell data quality really gets to way much airplay. Its good
for buy-in but really you do not need 100% accurate data. That is not the role
of BI. BI is about trends and overviews, not transactional accuracy. If your
sales trends are heading south but a couple of records are inaccurate by 5 or
10% - what should the exec worry about? Care about the trend of your business
not the quality outliers! However, we all know it is an issue, and I did touch
on this earlier there are a multitude of applications out in the business world
that allow users to enter junk data. The options are: one, to educate users on
data entry. Make accurate data entry a KPI so that data is cleaned over time.
Use your BI tool to highlight poor quality data and fix it at the source. Two,
for those with a bigger budget change your applications so that more data
validation takes place at the front end. Again this is about fixing it at the
source � do not try and clean data continually at the BI layer. There are better
methods for that.
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