Business Intelligence or Actionable Insight - Oh I See !
- By Arun Gupta, CTO, Shoppers Stop Limited
Last week when I met again with Sanjay, he coerced me into writing my thoughts on BI. While I do occasionally put up a post here and there, many a times I have found people find it difficult to accept some of my ideas or musings. So before you read ahead, be warned that you may not agree with everything I say and that’s okay.
Business Intelligence has been on the CIO radar for over 3 years now as per research reports from the major and respected IT research companies. Billions have been spent by companies and as a category, BI projects have seen the least success across almost all IT enabled initiatives. BI consultants will go about advising you that they “know” how to make it work for your enterprise and if and when things start faltering, it’s always you and your users who are responsible. I happened to ask a VP turned consultant from a large bank, “How is it that consultants have all the answers, but employees do not ?” and got no answer.
Every organization aspires to create intelligent insights from transactional data and act upon them to increase revenue, optimize profits, retain customers or create efficiencies. In most cases, users are unable to think or visualize what they want to achieve any of the above objectives and thus end up defining extremely complex scenarios and reports with a hope that they will provide some kind of “Eureka” brainwave and they will be heroes. IT organizations takes limited steps to dispell such myths and takes on the task of creating models that enable the complex reports. Maybe because they are not in the bath tub !
Typically such operational data based reports provide limited insight since the insight is driven by humans and not systems. A report viewed by different people creates different inferences and that a technology cannot provide. Technology works on models created by us and is thus limited by the information gathered and understood by the developer. This indeed is the key to actionable insight and the experience and frame of reference of the person which makes the difference.
This is not a great insight, but it is based on the experience of seeing many business leaders responding with differing insights to the same analytical report presented. It comes out of a deep domain expertise and lateral thinking. Such individuals if enrolled into the program can make the difference between a successful and not so successful BI project.
Left to IT organizations, which is the typical case with BI projects, the end result is multi-dimensional reporting which is finally used to review business but with limited insights. It is evident and obvious that right people make the difference, but the right people are normally too busy to spend long periods of time to understand the possibilities and list them down. If by chance that were to happen, the adoption by the rest of the organization suffers and gets blamed on bad “change management”.
So what is the conclusion ? A few “actionable insights” based on 3 BI projects.
1. Find the “right” person within the company who can help create insights. It may be your CEO ! If you cannot find such a person, don’t start the project
2. Start small and scale up as you taste success; before you attempt to build the Taj Mahal, practice some smaller buildings
3. Tools and technology matter, but in the end, the data quality makes the difference
4. Do not be averse to restarting from scratch in case the first model or the second model does not deliver. It’s quicker to recreate than attempting to patch a bad one
5. Keep on asking questions at every stage, “Why do you want this ?”, “How will it help you or the company ?”, “Who else can benefit from this ?”, you get the picture …..
6. Whatever you do in stage 1 may need to be discarded by the time you are in stage 3 and that’s okay.
Posted on August 29th, 2008 by Guest
Filed under: Business Intelligence
Arun
I could not agree with you more. I especially agree with your thoughts on starting small in BI and not trying to build a Taj mahal. I think one of the key challenges that technology faces is “how can IT get the power of analytics into the Business trenches,where it matters most”. The need to have a strong “change agent” cannot be overemphasized. The issue typically is that you cannot easily “manage your career and become a change agent”-sometimes bringing in an external change agent who has no other agenda may help.
The challenge you mention that IT organizations face occurs when IT is driving the project rather than business. The CIO/IT Organization can build the platform, program what’s desired, but cannot significantly influence usage.
External change agents are effective in scenarios where the risk ability of the organization is low. Then they need a crutch to stand on.
Well, continuing with the above point. It very important for the business to drive the Business Intelligence project. They should not look at it as just another IT automation project. The success of BI project is totally dependent on the involvement of the end business users.
Best approach as a BI project manager would be not to create a detailed and confusing BI plan at the very beginning. Try to create a small BI prototype/dashboard and showcase it and try to get the end business users excited about the wonders of BI which in turn should help BI project by their increase level of involvement.
Moreover, the business should be kept in loop at the ETL level also as it is very important to take a go ahead from Business on what data you are taking from the Enterprise Wide Database. Wrong data identification at this juncture would result into skewed output and at a later stage almost impossible to drill down to the actual cause of the problem.
Cheers,
Ritesh
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