Why Business Intelligence Consultants Fail at Introducing New BI Tools

Many studies, surveys and other empirical evidence shows that between 25 and 45 % of all Business Intelligence (BI) software is deprecated and ends up as shelf ware. This is less the fault of aggressive software vendors than BI consultants who can’t look beyond at least five blinkers. And whether the BI consultant(s) involved was an internal staff member or outsourced doesn’t affect the outcome.
There are many causes of failed BI tool introductions ranging from “no executive sponsorship”, via “an underdeveloped business case”  to “not managing the scope properly “ but all these are not at the root of the problem. The BI project leader and the BI Business Analyst are responsible to manage these risks. 
Let’s have a look at these five blinders that are at the root cause of poorly managed tool introductions:

• Focus on the technical aspects
• Not enough problem owners identified
• Managing expectations poorly
• Too much power in the hands of the BI consultant
• Pouring old wine in new bags

Focus on the technical aspects

A large publishing company asked us to compare two market leading BI tools. There were two technology factions in the IT department and we were asked to take the role of the objective referee between the two opposing camps. After days and days of intensive study, testing and two proofs of concept the differences were negligible and we advised the customer to  let the total cost of ownership decide which would be the tool of choice. But the two factions kept their hawkish stance on the tool of their choice.
We then tried to convince them to quit the technical discussions and take the business questions and the end user experience into account. The reaction of both parties was pointing at the real problem: “Managers all ask the same questions so this approach is irrelevant”.  In their vision the business questions were generic but the tool was unique. Never was the distance between IT and the business users wider. The lack of mutual understanding between business and IT is still prevalent in many organizations.  Only age old mail-order companies and pure play ecommerce enterprises have passed or skipped this development stage.

Not enough problem owners identified

If the BI consultants are unable to identify sufficient problem owners, the advice should be to postpone the tool introduction and if that is not possible, at least invest heavily in detecting and even creating problem owners. In too many cases finance and admin  (F&A) departments are the sole problem owners in a finance BI projects. As if HRM, marketing and operations have nothing to do with revenue,, variable and fixed costs…
During one of our BI audits in a third party logistics company we found that F&A had only knowledge of 27% of the total information needs. Yet the other 73 %  were in weaker or stronger form related to F&A information requirements… Needless to point out that this approach produces a weak foundation for a durable BI architecture.
Conclusion: the entire organization needs to own the information management problems and delegate these to the project steering committee.

Managing expectations poorly

During an audit of a customer relationship management (CRM) system at a large PC distributor we noticed it was impossible to create a product profile per customer. There was an order history per customer but these records only contained article number, price and quantity. If this multi million euro organisation had foreseen an extra field for category management, then this information had produced some meaning. Because who can tell if a 1Gb hard disk in 1998 was sold as consumer or a professional product?
The lesson to be learned is: before you accept any of the information requirements, you need to validate these against the available source data or else you may create expectations you can never meet.

Too much power in the hands of the BI consultant

We can all live with the fact that there are no objective consultants who can deliver totally value free advice based on scientific evidence. But one type of advice should always raise your suspicion: that of “consulting intensive”  BI tools. Any specialist knows that there are many degrees between “download, install and DIY” on one side and “Welcome to the consultants who will never leave” on the other. So make sure you choose a tool that can stay on board for at least five years. BI technology may produce a real or hyped breakthrough on every Gartner Summit but organisations need to be able to follow, adopt and adapt to the new technology to make maximum use of it.
I sometimes wonder if there is not a correlation between the size of the consulting organization and the size of the BI solution they bring to the table.
My advice: go visit a comparable organisation and see what their experience is with the BI tool and the consulting organization. It will set the PowerPoints of your BI consultants in perspective.

Pouring old wine in new bags

To paraphrase Bill Clinton: “It’s the user, stupid!”  Contrary to ERP systems where negative feedback is the norm and where users are forced to work with it, BI is a world of user motivation and positive feedback. If you avoid using the ERP system then essential documents and information like purchase orders, inventory status or invoices won’t be produced correctly and somebody higher up in the chain of command will have an urgent conversation with you. But if you avoid using the BI system because it is too difficult or it doesn’t provide answers to your questions then probably no one in the organisation will know, even if they use the monitoring tools. These tools will only tell them if you opened the cube or the report but they have nothing to say about the influence of the presented facts on your decision making process.
The possibilities to explore and exploit data are only limited by the availability of the data and your analytical capabilities. “Availability” should be translated into “usable, verifiable, quality-checked, well defined and traceable data which can support fact based decision making”, otherwise it is just… lots of data. Meaningless data can be very demotivating for end users. Think about it when you are setting up report bursting for example. The simple interaction “user effort – new insights” is what motivates users to come up with better decisions, smarter information requirements for new iterations. This simple interaction lifts the entire organization to a higher maturity level in BI.
It is also a plea for agile BI (read my agile BI manifesto here) because too many projects fail to deliver functionality within the time perspective of the user. If the user is not on board of the new system rapidly, he will be reluctant to trade in his spreadsheet and his calculator for something new that is not meeting his expectations.

Conclusion: introducing a new BI tool needs careful organisation wide change management. Anyone who thinks he can do with less will end up with nothing.
In the next post I will suggest a few remedies to increase the success factor of a new BI tool introduction. Stay tuned!

Some Thoughts on Predictive and Customer Analytics @BA4All

Last Thursday, three excellent sessions on predictive and customer analytics led me to a few conclusions

Technology allows very old dreams of marketers to come true:

• To know and understand the response logistics from product design or customization via the attention – interest – desire – action chain to the sales counter,
• To decompose aggregate marketing information to the lowest grain: the individual consumer,
• To get deep understanding of switching behavior while the consumer is shopping,
• To monitor online the impact of all marketing variables

The more technology evolves and delivers value, the more need for human relationship and context management becomes a necessity. These are two sides of the same coin in business intelligence: user acceptance and user integration of data driven decision making will be the bottleneck in any marketing technology push.
And finally, all this new stuff still needs to pass the test of a well balanced business case. The balance between the added value of information in hard currency and a softer evaluation of improving the strategic position with new technology needs careful study.
Go the website for the full article.

Real-time BI, who would have thought that twenty years ago?

(Abstract)

Business Intelligence has come a long way. From the static, rigorous decision support systems to the agile BI architectures and the volatile Big Data stores... It has been a journey filled with success and failure, with never ending discussions about which architecture would provide a robust future proof delivery platform.

With social analytics as a new addition to real time BI, another discussion is opened: 

where and how is (near-) real time BI worth the investment?

And what aspects need to be considered to produce a balanced investment appraisal?

These are the topics I will address in this article which is published here.

A Small Presentation on Big Data

In eight minutes I make the connection between marketing, information management and Big Data to position the real value of it and separate it from the hype.
Click here for the presentation.

Wishing you a great 2014, where you will make decisions based on facts and data be successful in all your endeavours.

Kind regards,

bert

Download our Webinar slides from the ITMPI

We have posted the slides of two webinars on our Lingua Franca site for you to download:

How Business Analysis for Business Intelligence Creates Strategic Value

How to Keep Business Intelligence in Sync with Your Strategic Priorities

Send us your feedback, we look forward to reading your comments.

Business Intelligence has become too big to allow failure.

Four speakers between Ralph Kimball’s sessions, four topics and one unifying thought: BI is getting to big to allow failure. The first Business Analytics for All Insight session which took place in Brussels the 12th November gathered over 250 attendees to hear Ralph Kimball’s insights on the data warehouse design principles and how the Big Data phenomenon fits in this architecture. I gladly refer to the Kimball Group’s website with articles like these for his vision on Big Data.  

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.

Interview with a Business Intelligence User

Let’s call him Eric. Because after the interview Eric decided he’d better remain anonymous. Some of his answers could cause too much controversy in the organization, a major European logistics company.

Eric is BI manager in this company and when listening to his vision, his worries and his concerns, it is like taking stock of the most common disconnects between IT and the business.

Question: What struck you the most when reading the book “Business Analysis for Business Intelligence”?

Eric: I think you have documented your book well and chose a useful starting point. Most literature in Business Intelligence (BI) is divided in two categories.  On one side you have a myriad of theoretical works on strategy and management,  performance management  and the inevitable scorecards and dashboards. On the other side are plenty technical publications available discussing IT performance and optimum data structures. What many of these books lack is a vision of how business and IT should join hands to produce optimum BI results. From my 20 years’ experience with BI, this is a serious problem.

Question: What are the major impediments for your performance as a BI manager?

Eric: I see three roadblocks: IT is either unaware or unwilling to admit that BI cannot be standardized. But the business itself is not always capable of producing crisp and consistent definitions to produce a coherent analytical frameworks changes its mind”. And last but not least: the complexity of some analytics also causes a lot of problems and is –of course- compounded by the two previous roadblocks.

Question: Why would IT not be aware of the need for flexibility? Some IT guys we know say stuff like “The business guys always change their mind”

Eric:  No, it’s not about business changing its mind because that can be prevented through thorough analysis as described in your book. It is more about the prejudice that BI solutions are templates you can use anywhere. IT people underestimate the uniqueness of each business process and its context, culture and informal issues that make every business unique. Management can shift its attention and rearrange its priority list in days and weeks. If IT can’t follow, the users look for ad hoc (and often badly architected) solutions.

Thank you for sharing this with  us, Eric. 

To our readers: don’t hesitate to share your experience with the gap between business and IT in BI. We can all learn from this!