No. 1: Lack of BI Strategy
When undertaking a business intelligence project, the question that must have a rock-solid, compelling answer is, “Why are we doing this?” In other words, how having this BI will drive specific business benefits and drive business value must be clearly articulated. When BI lacks a compelling and well-communicated value proposition as, sadly, it does for many organisations, we often see these tell tail signs:
- Requirements are stated as lists of data elements to be brought into the data warehouse, rather than as the business analyses (business questions) that BI will enable the business to perform
- The executives who must approve investments in BI are reluctant to do so, because they don’t understand what benefits they, and the business, will derive from them
- The proponents of BI have a “build it and they will use it” mindset rather than specific plans for embedding BI in fundamental business processes and decisions
- The value propositions promised by BI are vague and generic (e.g. “enable us to understand our customers better”). The BI justification is silent regarding what specific information will be provided, who will use it in which business processes, how that information will enable more informed/better decisions, and which business KPI’s/results will be favorably affected
Such symptoms denote a lack of BI strategy. A business intelligence project is just like any other business improvement technique: There must be a strategy/plan/roadmap that describes exactly what it will do, how the organisation must change to leverage it, and specifically how having it will drive positive business results.
Don’t get bogged down with these specifics though, we provide a strategy service where a roadmap can be written and presented for you.
No. 2: Lack of BI Readiness
What is BI readiness? Essentially, it means that the necessary pre-conditions for BI success are in place. If these preconditions aren’t in place, it does little good to embark on a BI initiative without first addressing them; if not, time, effort and money will likely be wasted and no good outcome achieved.
As business intelligence consultants, we use several diagnostic methods – interviews, checklists, questionnaires, surveys, documentation review, and more – to assess a client organisation’s BI readiness. If you’re undertaking a new BI initiative, or looking to revamp a stalled BI program you can use some of the following questions – similar to the ones we use in our methodology – to assess your own BI readiness:
- Does your organisation have and consistently use a framework for prioritising and managing investments in BI? Investments in BI are conceptually no different than any other type of business investment, and should be managed with the same rigor.
- To what degree does your organisation have an objective, fact-based understanding of the quality of its data? The quality of information that can be provided by BI is limited by the quality of the data available.
- Does your organisation have people with the necessary BI skills and use appropriate BI-specific technical methods?
- Does your organisation understand the change management challenges of BI, and appropriately address them? BI entails consuming information for the purpose of making more informed/better decisions. In other words, it fundamentally is a thinking process, any time we’re asking someone to change the way they think about a problem or business situation, change management is a critical element. BI often requires the use of new/different software tools, which can be another change management challenge, especially for less computer-savvy users.
- Does your organisation know how to identify and manage the risks associated with a BI initiative? All business improvement initiatives, especially those – like BI – enabled by information technology, entail risks that must be predicted, discerned, and mitigated when they occur.
If the answer to the above questions generally is “no,” that indicates a lack of BI readiness that must be addressed before proceeding with BI. Attempting BI without the fundamental preconditions for success in place is likely to be frustrating, painful, costly, and destined to fail.
No. 3: Lack of Direction
It is common for organisations that have BI to have multiple data warehouses/data repositories/BI environments, multiple BI tool sets and multiple user communities. All those multiples are not necessarily bad. Sometimes they indicate a scattergun approach to BI: each department or business unit has its own BI undertaking, BI is accomplished via a number of uncoordinated projects, and everyone does his/her own thing when it comes to BI.
Symptoms of uncoordinated BI include:
- The number you get depends upon whom you ask for it (because different people use different BI systems to obtain the number)
- Multiple data repositories contain the same data (such as customer orders), but that data doesn’t necessarily agree
- Multiple projects do essentially the same thing
- Multiple BI tools with similar functionality are in use
- It is unclear which BI projects get approved/funded and why
- Many BI projects are not completed on time and/or deliver reduced scope
Uncoordinated BI efforts indicate lack of direction. In many organisations, the initial venture into BI is by a single department or business unit working to solve a specific business problem, often with limited or no involvement by IT. As time goes by, several of these point BI solutions develop, resulting in multiple unintegrated BI systems, multiple data repositories, multiple BI tools, and so on.
The risks of this approach continuing are:
- Competing versions of the truth
- Duplicated cost/effort
- Incremental technical complexity and cost from multiple similar technologies in use
At some point in their BI evolution, most organisations reach the point where they need a coordinated, managed approach to BI. Such an approach is best guided by a BI strategy/roadmap and a BI data architecture plan.
No. 4: Lack of Execution
An organisation’s dissatisfaction with its BI progress often manifests as feedback from the BI user community like:
- It takes too long for the BI team to complete projects or even to fulfill requests for minor enhancements/modifications or new reports and dashboards
- BI applications are not easy to use, requiring lots of user knowledge of tools and data structures and/or lots of manual effort
- Reports and other output mechanisms often aren’t available when they are supposed to be, because the batch processing that updates them either didn’t finish on time or failed
- Query response time is slow. (We often hear from client users that queries take 15 to 30 minutes to an hour to run.)
- It is difficult to determine which/how reports and other output mechanisms satisfy users’ stated requirements. Reconciling what the BI team delivered versus what users asked for is problematic.
- It is not transparent to users how the metrics and other results delivered by BI were calculated and/or to tie them to official results and systems of record
- BI projects either don’t deliver all of the functionality they promised, or their scope continually creeps and they never quite completely finish
Feedback like this is extremely common and is symptomatic of a lack of execution problem. The company might have well-articulated requirements, a sound BI strategy, and a good tool set, but it is not good at designing, building, maintaining, and supporting BI applications. The result, as evidenced by the user feedback above, is BI applications that run slowly, break frequently, are hard to use, deliver uncertain results, take longer to build and cost more than they should.
The causes of lack of execution often are multiple and varied, as are its remedies. Successful, repeatable BI execution depends requires these capabilities:
- Sufficient funding
- Executive support
- Sustained involvement in BI projects by the right business representatives
- Use of a BI-specific development methodology
- The right number of staff – which could be company employees or external – with the necessary BI skills
- Project management skills and discipline
- Change management skills
No. 5: Lack of BI Impact
In the fifth common BI problem, we see an all-too-common scenario: The organisation has invested in BI, and has one or more BI applications in place. But it is unclear exactly how the business benefits from having BI. There is low utilisation of deployed BI applications, in fact, some might not be being used at all.
We are continually surprised when we go into a new client how frequently it has a BI application that was developed and implemented with good intentions, but no one wound up using it. The application continues to run in production, with the data being updated every night in batch and new reports generated, but no one can tell us who logs into the application or looks at its output.
Even if the BI application is being used, when we ask the question, “What business results are better as a result of the information this application provides?” all we get are blank looks. Key decision-makers in the business do not use information from this system and might not even be aware that it exists, moreover, they have unmet needs for information, are not satisfied with what investments in BI have yielded the organisation, and therefore are reluctant to approve any additional funding for BI. They might even want to pull the funding it already has, and redeploy that budget somewhere else.
- Business value of BI investments not captured
- Low utilisation of deployed BI
- No change in business results attributable to BI
- Unsatisfied business users
- BI funding in jeopardy
These symptoms indicate lack of BI impact. The organisation has BI, but the questions “Who cares?” and “How does having BI matter?” do not have clear answers.
It can be difficult to recover BI impact after the fact (i.e., after the BI application already is designed, built, and in production). The requirements-gathering process for BI should explicitly link requirements for information to the business process(es) in which that information will be used, how it will be used, who will use it, and which KPI’s and/or strategic objectives will be advanced.
Conclusion: Done Right, BI can have a Major Profit Impact
This recitation of Common Reasons Why BI Projects Fail might cause you to lose heart and doubt the value of business intelligence. Don’t be discouraged. Yes, BI can be challenging to do well, but the potential business benefits make it worth the effort. And the good news is that the common problems we have discussed have solutions proven through successful application in many organisations.
These solutions include:
- Treatment of BI as a business and profit improvement initiative rather than an IT-centric undertaking
- Focus on supporting key business objectives with better information embedded in specific business processes
- Use of a BI-specific development methodology
Many organisations don’t possess the internal BI expertise necessary to recognise their BI challenges and leverage these solutions to prevent and overcome them, but with solid strategy and guidance, organisations can harness the power of BI for improved business results and demonstrable business value.
We know this may sound daunting but that’s why we are here! Call us today (01628 421512) and talk to the experts. We can have an open and completely agnostic conversation, with no obligation, to help you go forward with your business intelligence project.