But between Ralph’s talks in the morning
and in the afternoon, four other topics were discussed which all lead to the same
conclusion: BI has become too big, too much of a strategic commitment to allow
for sloppy business analysis and project management.
Annelies Aquarius, European BI Project
manager from the Coca-Cola Company illustrated the anytime- anything-anywhere
aspects of mobile BI. Jelle Defraye from Laco made a case for self service BI. Jos Van Dongen from SAS taught us the basics
from data visualisation and Guy Van der Zande from USG ICT Professionals
explained why a well organised BI Competence Center (BICC) is essential to
manage technology trends and changing business requirements.
For a full description of their talks we refer to the website.
It is time for proper BI business analysis and project management
Let me explain my point. With the growth of
users, user types, data a lot of side effects have come into play since the
early days of DSS where you offloaded a few tables to make reports for the CFO.
Exabytes of data flowing in at incredibly
high speeds from a myriad of data sources in structured, semi-structured and
structured formats need to be exploited by more people in a faster decision
making cycle which is not limited to the strategic apex anymore. Thus the
feedback loops become more complicated as the one-to-many relationship of top
management and the workforce now becomes a many-to-many relationship between
more and more decision making actors in the organisation. Self service BI,
mobile BI and visualisation are all part of the solution and the problem if
your organisation has no duopolistic governance from IT and the business. because
both business processes and data management processes need to be mutually
adjusted to allow for maximum return on investment . The alternative is chaos.
So there you have the true value of a
well working BICC.
But to get there and to stay on that level,
only a thorough business analysis process and the proper BI project management
method will increase the success rate of business analytics. This success rate
worries me. Because after twenty years in this business I am still seeing
failure rates of 80% in BI. If we’d had the same rate of improvement in
medicine as in BI we would still be using leeches and bleeding our patients
regardless of the disease.
