Why BI Initiatives Fail?
There are projects that become industry-wide references and then there are those that are dusted away beneath the carpet. The bigger solution providers have a higher rate of success than smaller solution providers simply because they have a very well defined program on how to deliver certain projects. They have a gold mine of internal documents/trainings/mentoring and have a better rate of success.
Being part of a firm that is regarded as one of the biggest and most prestigious consulting firms – the big blue, I have had a lot of experience in managing EDW/BI implementations. I have learned first hand on what are the key points-of-failure and I share them with my readers.
-Ownership by Client/Insufficient User Involvement
-Large Scope
-Data Integrity/Quality
-Budget Hogs/Funding
-Corporate rivalries
-Poorly defined or incomplete KPI’s
-Complex Data Model/Cubes
-Strong coupling between EDW and BI environment
This post was submitted by Shehzad K
Posted on March 24th, 2009 by Guest
Filed under: Business Intelligence
While I agree with the main points regarding success/failure, in my opinion the main point is the disconnect between who uses and who benefits. This in turn drives data quality south, increases the delay in obtaining the expected results and so on.
In simpler terms, BI is sold as a “silver bullet” to Senior management, but the needs and expectations of the operational personnel are not taken into account (technitians, sales personnel, warehouse, etc). They are fundamental because they provide the raw data that will become the high level intelligence used in the executive suite. So, without a good, steady flow of quality data – both structured and un-structured – no BI is successfull. Vice-versa, if one has that flow, BI takes on a life of it’s own and truly empowers the organisation, mainly because the organisation has been empowered to start off with.