Critical steps to business intelligence success

By Christina Torode, Senior News Writer | Jun 22, 2009

0 comments

Delicious

Digg

Email

Print

Businesses that start building, purchasing or customizing business intelligence applications without thoroughly understanding the range of users who will utilize the data are making a critical mistake in their business intelligence strategy that will quickly come to light through poor adoption, experts and practitioners say.

Instead, project leaders need to classify users and define their needs at the outset, then continue to engage and train them throughout the lifecycle of the application. Most organizations miss this critical step when developing a business intelligence strategy, said Boris Evelson, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. He stresses that buying a business intelligence (BI) application should not even be one of the first 10 steps in creating a business intelligence strategy.

'I can't tell you how many BI RFPs I see every year, and front and center are multiple tech and operational requirements, line after line of them, and there is only one line item for user types,' Evelson said.

CIOs need to define business users and acknowledge that individuals, groups and business units cannot be lumped into one line item called 'user requirements.' 'A front-line information worker, a strategic decision maker that needs large data sets and complex charts, and an operations decision maker that looks across a lot of different aspects of the business … those data models can't live together. You need different BI tool sets for different sets of users,' he said.

Once a tool is chosen, a common mistake is asking sets of users to write down or verbally describe the types of data they want to see and the reports they need from the business intelligence application. The problem with text is that it often doesn't give the development team a specific direction or format, such that users later say, 'That's not what I meant or wanted,' when they see the idea in graph or report format, said Rob Fosnaugh, BI lead at Brotherhood Mutual Insurance Co. in Fort Wayne, Ind.

Instead, whenever users want new features or reports, the BI team needs to push them to formulate their needs in the format of the BI tool.

At Brotherhood Mutual, it took two months of back and forth over this before a new claims department dashboard was put into production. In the first meeting, the needs of the group were discussed and each member -- the vice president of operations and three managers in charge of workers compensation, properties and claims -- was given an assignment for the next meeting: graph their needs on a single sheet of paper, no text allowed.