Business intelligence (BI) is essential for Business growth and competitive advantage, yet reaping benefits from BI requires more than implementing the technology that enables it.
In fact, deploying the technology is the easiest part of any BI initiative, according to Boris Evelson, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research. Getting the personnel and processes portions right are much more challenging, he says.
As such, organizations must addresses personnel and processes as key facets of their BI strategy if they want to be successful. Moreover, BI strategies should be broken down even further to address ownership and continual improvement as well.
Following are seven essential components of any successful BI strategy, according to several BI experts.
Organizations that place BI in the hands of business users have greater success rates than those who confine BI within IT, Evelson says. This may mean embedding BI within lines of business or having BI operations report to the chief digital officer or chief customer officer.
“The business must absolutely be in charge,” he adds.
Although the complexities of early BI technologies put IT in charge of many BI programs, today’s tools are more intuitive, allowing them to go straight into the hands of business users who can run the queries that matter to them.
Similarly, the speed at which users need access to data and insights derived from BI has increased dramatically in recent years. Today’s business users often need actionable information in real time and cannot wait for IT to generate reports.
As such, IT ownership can be an impediment, rather than enabler, of BI success, Evelson says.
Although the business should own BI initiatives, IT must remain an active partner in monitoring and evaluating use of BI systems.
As Evelson explains: “Rather than putting up roadblocks, monitor what they’re doing, what data sources they’re accessing, what tools they are using and how they are using them, whether business unit A is using BI more than business unit B.”
In this way, he says, the CIO can set thresholds in partnership with business units. For instance, the CIO will know whether a few analysts in marketing have downloaded their own tool and are successfully using it, in which case it may be fine to leave them alone. Likewise, the CIO will notice when that BI application has seen an increasing number of users across business and has thus become an enterprise-grade environment and a mission-critical enterprise app that requires additional discipline and governance.
Organizations may be tempted to quickly spin out lots of BI capabilities, but quality outweighs quantity, says Chris Hagans, vice president of operations for WCI Consulting, a consultancy focused on BI.
“It’s better to have fewer things you trust than have a whole lot of things that are suspect,” he says.
As a result, organizations need a strong validation process that focuses on enabling access to all the data needed to answer queries. It should also prevent problematic data from entering the BI system so that it doesn’t produce faulty insights. In addition, the validation process should be agile enough to respond quickly to requests for new BI functions.
Hagans points to a hypothetical use case in which a BI tool generates reports on net sales figures. If that tool takes in data on sales but doesn’t figure in the number of sold items that are returned, then the end information is no good.
Moreover, Hagans says validation remains critical not just to ensure accuracy but also to head off skeptics.
“It only takes one or two people saying, ‘I don’t trust the data,’ to invalidate a report. That can tank a whole project, and then reports just become worthless,” he says.
Don’t take a build-it-and-they-will-come approach to BI initiatives, Evelson warns. Too many organizations build data repositories, lay BI on top and then expect business users to jump right in and play, he says.
