“Gartner sees a big discrepancy between BI expectations and realities” – Intelligent Enterprise

Doug Henschen
 
Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise reports from the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit in Washington D.C., explaining that Gartner analysts John Van Decker and Kurt Schlegel cited five reasons why BI projects do not live up to expectations (article link here):
 

  1. No IT-Business Partnership – “We have to get away from thinking of it as a vendor-customer relationship,” said Schlegel.
  2. No Link to Corporate Strategy – BI team have to listen to the executives and develop metrics and measures that are aligned with their goals.
  3. No connection to the Process – “BI has been overtly disconnected for too long,” Schlegel proclaimed. It’s not enough to deliver the right information to the right users. You have to insert those insights into the processes and interfaces that business users live in every day.”
  4. No Governance or Too Much – It has to be just the right amount of governance. BI grew up departmentally, so it’s all too common to have many silos of BI. At the other extreme, some companies are so uptight about data standards that companies can’t get their data into the warehouse.
  5. No Skills – Business users often lack skills, chimed in Van Decker, citing the one area where the business side was said to be falling short. “Most companies have very sophisticated capabilities available that folks just aren’t taking advantage of,” he said, pointing to corporate performance management (CPM) software as a leading example.

 
I come close to the situation of words failing me when I read a list like this (though not close enough to prevent me penning an article of course). I appreciate that maybe a public seminar is not the easiest place to provide deep insights (I present a lot myself), but the commentary against each of the problem areas seems odd to me. I’m not sure that these are really the five reasons for BI continuing to disappoint in some organisations, while it continues to delight in others, but here are my thoughts on each headline.
 

  1. No IT-Business Partnership – We have to stop talking about IT and Business as if they were two parties trying to negotiate a cease-fire. IT is a business department, it carries out business projects. It would be ridiculous to say that there needs to be a Sales-Business Partnership, it should be equally so with IT. I expand on this theme in the very first article on this blog.
  2. No Link to Corporate Strategy – There should not be a link to Corporate Strategy, BI does not exist as a separate entity that requires linkage. Instead BI work should be an expression of Corporate Strategy (as should any IT project), what else is it an expression of? This is not about listening to executives (though that is important) it is about IT being part of the senior management team of an organisation and not some semi-detached entity, focussed only on the beauty of its own navel. I give some indication of how to go about ensuring that this is the case in two articles, one focussed on a European environment and one spanning four continents.
  3. No connection to the Process – I agree that embedding good BI in a coporoate culture requires effort (indeed I have written a series of articles on the subject, starting with this one), however I struggle to see how any BI team could fail to realise this and pay the area due attention. If this is truly a reason for failure, then it is because of a lack of basic project and change management skills in BI teams.
  4. No Governance or Too Much – I’m not sure that achieving the Goldilocks approach to Governance is the issue here. BI’s impact on an organisation is directly proportional to how pervasive it is. This means that silos of BI reduce value and the walls need to be knocked in. Does this have to be all in one go? of course not, there are always benefits in a balance between incremental progress and paradigm shifts. Any organisation who has gatekeepers who refuse access to the warehouse because of and overly rigid approach to data standards is going to have problems. Equally where systems are developed with little thought to the information that they provide and data is simply thrown over the wall to the BI team, this is going to destroy value. As ever, there needs to be a sensible balance struck, one that yields the greatest business benefit for the lowest cost.
  5. No Skills – “Business users often lack skills”, this seems both incredibly patronising (are only IT people smart enough to get it?) and also a poor excuse for BI teams not paying enough attention to education (see point 3. above). If business people truly lack the skills to use good BI, then they are probably unfit to be in business as the tools are pretty intuitive (if not over-engineered by an approach that is too technology-focussed). More likely, training has been poor, or the BI deliveries have failed to be tailored to answering questions that the business wants to ask.

 
In summary, I don’t have five reasons for BI failing to live up to expectations, I have one. I firmly believe that BI done well is both the easiest of IT systems to sell to people and has one of the highest paybacks of any IT initiative. BI done badly (at the design, development, implementation or follow-up stages) will fail.

The issue is basically a simple one: just how good is your BI team? If a BI implementation fails to deliver significant business value, then instead of looking for scape-goats, the BI team should purchase a mirror and start using it.
 


 
Continue reading about this area in: Some reasons why IT projects fail
 
 
Doug Henschen joined Intelligent Enterprise as Editor in 2004 and was named Editor-in-Chief in January 2007. He has specialized in covering the intersection of business intelligence, performance management, business process management and rules management technologies within enterprise applications and architectures. He previously served as Editor-in-Chief of Transform Magazine, which covered content management and business process management challenges.

I comment on another Intelligent Enterprise article, this one by Cindi Howson, here.
 

BI vendors need inspiration – Andreas Bitterer at Gartner

gartner-andreas-bitterer

I rather belatedly picked up on an article by Andreas Bitterer posted on the Gartner blogs network. The title of this piece is Same Old Business Intelligence.

Andreas talks about the growing maturity of the BI market and identifies phases such as integration and innovation that now seem to be largely past. With all of the recent consolidation of the BI vendor market, it is difficult to see any major new plays in this arena. Also many BI tools now have functionality and scalability to spare. Andreas calls for vendors to have greater inspiration in order to unlock the latent potential of BI.

I agree that BI is now a very mature market. Of course there may be some disruptive technology about to be released which will change this perspective, but until this emerges, the description is accurate. While this may make 2009 onwards as less exciting time for people selling BI tools and platforms, the maturity of a technology tends to be correlated with the potential for it to add value in a business context. I hope that BI has now arrived at this tipping point and that the current economic climate may even be seen to have been positive for BI in retrospect.

What I feel is missing is not technology, but a more grown-up approach to leveraging BI in organisations. If BI is to come of age then there it needs to become more of a strategic enabler than a point solution. Each department having its own BI seems to be an obstacle. As I have argued elsewhere, it is only when a holistic approach is taken to BI that organisations begin to reap the real benefits. In the same article I also explain my view that an incremental approach to implementation is complimentary to this vision, but the vision needs to come first.

Having succeeded in making the use BI part of an organisation’s DNA, I hope that this approach will start to become the norm and that BI will move to the strategic centre business; the place from which its true potential can be realised.
 

Gartner says “BI must transform and improve businesses”

The title is paraphrased. The actual quote, as reported on BeyeNETWORK, is as follows: –

“Organizations will expect IT leaders in charge of BI and performance management initiatives to help transform and significantly improve their business,” said Nigel Rayner, research vice president of Gartner. “This year’s predictions focus on the need for BI and performance management to deliver greater business value.”

To me this immediately suggests one, potentially awkward, question – what on Earth have some BI initiatives been focussed on before 2009 if it was not transforming and improving business?