TOWARDS A SUCCESSFUL BI IMPLEMENTATION
Part 1: Why companies fail to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation?
When companies grow they need systems that will streamline and optimize operation performance, help them in making better decision based on data and trends and come up with strategies that are in line with the business goals of the organization. This is possible through Business Intelligence. In an effort to implement a BI system, companies either plan to (1) have a team that will be dedicated to write the software, (2) outsource the job of developing the systems to a vendor or (3) implement a product that will meet the BI requirements. Option (3) is, in most cases, better than option (1) and (2) because it can be implemented faster and in most cases will cost lesser. The most important factors of a BI implementation is to know and understand why BI is required, the goals that should be met, the strategies that will help in meeting the goals and product that will fit the immediate and the long term needs of the organization. Reports say that companies, over a period of time have purchased and implemented different BI products under different leaderships. CIOs come and go and they leave their mark in the company in terms of a product implementation or changes to the software environment based on what they feel are the best. This drains out the resources of the company and never gets them what they really want. In this article, I will try to focus on how a company can take the right steps to successfully implement a BI system that will meet the strategic business goals of the company.
Most of the companies get all their reporting needs by having someone write SQL queries against the database and export the reports to excel. When their business and database grow, their current systems fail to meet all their reporting needs. Some reports become very complex to be generated. Some might take a very long time to get generated. In such cases, companies typically give the responsibility of implementing a BI system to one of the IT managers who would then consult a BI product company or a System Integrator for advice and implementation. During the engagement, a BI product is identified (not using scientific means, but in most cases driven by budget availability) and implemented to take care of their operational and other reporting needs. The advantage is that this approach will meet the short term goals and possibly improve report generation speed and also make the generation of a few complex reports possible. But the disadvantage is that this approach (1) will not meet the long term needs (2) will not, in most cases, have full support from the management and the users because they don’t understand the benefits or none are consulted, (3) will be used mostly as a reporting system without taking the full advantage of BI features and (4) since the IT managers have minimal business knowledge the final system fail to deliver the expected business benefits.
In the next post, we will discuss what companies should do to extract maximum benefits from their BI implementation.
