With Business Intelligence (BI) fast becoming a top priority for most enterprises, achieving RoI through BI implementation has come as a major challenge for IT leaders. While many CIOs plan to invest in BI in near future, most of them fear BI failure. It is also interesting to note that BI is just a reporting tool for most of these CIOs.
Despite the risk of BI failure, it is a known fact that business intelligence can provide significant benefits, if deployed in the right way, at the right instance, and with the right mapping. However, it is not a sound investment option if considered just as a simple and basic reporting tool.
BI technology has been maturing over the years. CEOs are getting more aware and demanding it for better business decision-making. Greyhound Research believes that it is critical for business heads to consider the following points to avoid BI failure.
Investments: Enterprises make large investments during the initial stages of BI deployment and back office analysts do not have the capabilities to utilize those investments. It is preferable to have a step by step approach with the right analyst, appropriate talent and suitable tools to avoid BI project failures.
Identifying Business value: Besides the risk of BI failure, one of the most common snags is that not enough business value is attached to every investment. Absence of business value in a project is bound to make it fail in the long run. Senior managers should work towards attaching business value and communicating the same internally, since in the process they can avert BI failure.
Bottom-lines: IT heads need to think how a BI project can affect the company’s bottom-lines. CIOs can go in for creation of BI competency centres- Centres of Excellence (CoE). These CoEs can help in streamlining the BI and data management processes, avoiding the risk of a BI failure. CoEs can also bring IT and business users together. With this, the CIO can manage expectations, have unified strategy, and redefine the testing parameters in the process, avoiding BI failure.
Data definition: A key limitation behind BI project failure is poor quality and lack of data definition. At times, data lies in silos across different departments. Most departments like to own their data and manipulate the same. Hence, cultural transformation of accountability needs to happen in order to avoid BI failure in the long run.
Vendor assessment: The decision to buy BI from a particular vendor only because some enterprise applications were bought from him in the pastcould eventually lead to BI failure. While choosing the BI system, it is very critical to evaluate different vendors in the market rather than going in for the current application vendor. Assessment is critical in the BI adoption strategy, and a proper evaluation will ensure prohibit the encounter BI failure.
Education: Education is essential to make a BI project successful. Deployment of dashboards should be the last step in a successful BI implementation. Enterprises need to have a more integrated and unified strategy to keep BI failure at bay.
Since management buy-in is crucialfor any project to succeed. Similar is the case with BI projects in order to avoid their failure. The top management can only be convinced with a right understanding, appropriate strategy and suitable tools in place to start a BI journey.
Source: CXOtoday
About The Author: Sanchit Vir Gogia is the Chief Analyst & CEO of Greyhound Research, an independent IT & Telecom Research & Advisory firm. He also serves as Founder & CEO of Greyhound Knowledge Group that operates under four brands – Greyhound Research, Greyhound Sculpt, Greyhound Technocrat and Greyhound Vivo. To read more about him, click here.