You can email Barney Finucane, the author of this section, if you have any comments, observations or user experiences to add. Last updated on July 12, 2007.
The human factor
The results of The OLAP Survey, which is the largest independent survey of customer satisfaction in the area of BI, show that difficulties involving people are one of the main factors causing delays and failure in BI projects. In fact, people-related problems cause many more difficulties than bad data and buggy software put together.
Communication between IT and business users
The main fault line in any BI project lies between the business users and the IT department. For people caught up in this situation, it is tempting to blame the problems on the intransigence of the other side, or on management issues that can only be dealt with on the top level.
In fact, the real issue involved is that business intelligence solutions are a unique challenge to any IT environment. To work effectively, at least some of the business users need to get their hands on the data and actively manipulate it in way that goes far beyond the scope of standard business practice.
Business intelligence is a balancing act between complexity and flexibility, and business intelligence vendors are accustomed to their customers saying they want complete control and flexibility without any complexity. But from the point of view of an IT department, it means that a small minority of the users are unreasonably trying to take control of processes that they are unlikely to be able to handle, such as database administration. For the business users, IT seems intransigent — preventing business users from getting the data they need just because they can.
There is no simple black and white solution to the problem. The question is: where do you draw the line? Where do the responsibilities of IT end, and where do those of the business users begin? The answer varies from company to company, and depends upon the skills and interests of the individuals involved. Finding the right solution requires close cooperation, patience and good will on both sides.
Specifications and the learning curve
Another problem is deciding what needs to be done. A large minority of BI projects run into trouble because the project team is unsure what needs to be done. Again, in a situation like this it is tempting to point the finger at certain individuals, but this fails to explain why the problem occurs so often.
There are several reasons why planning a BI project is so difficult. First, the people planning the project tend to have a relatively weak grasp of what is possible and what the true costs of implementing individual features will be. This is made worse by the vendor strategy of saying "we can do anything", which is usually more or less true, but tends to ignore the difficulties of delivering some capabilities. Vendors prefer to discuss their products strengths. Second, it is hard to judge the results of a BI project in advance, because good BI software changes the way people work, so planners have no firm ground to stand on. Third, particularly in large projects, there may be widely different priorities among the project sponsors.
Project drift
As the project ages, priorities begin to shift. Key players enter or leave the scene, company reorganizations change the working assumptions, and impatience may lead users to adapt stopgap measures that take on a life of their own as rival solutions to the problem. This can be avoided to a certain extent by clearly defining goals from the start, and working to execute as quickly as possible, but it cannot be completely avoided. Project drift can lead to inefficiency, but in some cases, changing your plans part way through a project is unavoidable.
Business Intelligence Competency Centers
One increasingly popular way of coordinating the complexity surrounding business intelligence is setting up a business intelligence Competency center. A BI Competency center can be a dedicated organization to deal with the questions that arise on a full-time basis, but usually only the largest companies have enough projects to justify the expense involved. More commonly, the BI Competency center is a virtual cross-departmental organization that meets regularly to coordinate policy. It is important to have members from various departments involved so that all key issues receive the consideration they deserve.
A BI Competency center may address a variety of issues. These may include:
- Identifying and prioritizing potential projects
- Selecting appropriate software for specific projects
- Setting company-wide standards and policies on software usage
- Setting standards for support levels
- Supporting the specification process
- Reviewing the progress of projects
- Coordinating data quality management initiatives
However, BI Competency centers are a relatively new trend that parallels the trend for standardization of BI software and the move towards suites. So the details would vary from company to company. In some cases, BI Competency centers also take on responsibility for providing support for users of BI solutions or even play a role in implementation, but usually they have an advisory or coordinating role.
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