I have become very interested in the differences between successful and not so successful BI projects. In my blog post, BI Project Success; 5 Mistakes To Avoid, I discuss some of the lessons I have learnt from my own experiences in implementing Business Intelligence projects.
Those lessons will certainly help you avoid delivering a project that is rejected by your users, customers and key stakeholders. But, in a world where anyone in the company (from the office intern to the CFO/CEO) can discover new, faster, cheaper or better ways of "doing IT" there are many more factors to consider if you really want to deliver that killer BI project.
Those lessons will certainly help you avoid delivering a project that is rejected by your users, customers and key stakeholders. But, in a world where anyone in the company (from the office intern to the CFO/CEO) can discover new, faster, cheaper or better ways of "doing IT" there are many more factors to consider if you really want to deliver that killer BI project.
- Changing user profiles: 10 years ago consumers of BI platforms were satisfied with solutions that allowed them to easily and quickly report on organisational data. There was certainly a lot of focus on management reporting. Anything that could shorten this process was considered to be revolutionary. Fast forward to 2014 and the game has changed. It is no longer enough to produce a BI solution that only satisfied management reporting. According to Gartner, trends are shifting from being reporting-centric to analysis-centric. Staff and customers have become more technology savvy and are accustomed to easy access to information at their fingertips when they are at home and they expect the same at work.
- Big Data: OK, so for most companies Big Data is still a bit of a "buzz word". In fact it is probably true to say other than a handful of large companies with a healthy R&D budget most companies are aware of big data but haven't really dabbled in it that much. However, there are some aspects of it that can't be ignored that may affect the success of your BI implementation.
- Variety - End users are becoming more comfortable with the fact that not all data lives on your corporate server. It is quite common for "power users" to combine data from your organisation's data warehouse with data from external sources e.g. the department of statistics or an industry bench-marking database. This means your data warehouse is no longer the "single source of truth" that is widely talked about. Examples of such data are social media, mobile and email. For your BI project to be successful you have to acknowledge these external data sources and where possible incorporate them into your warehouse or at least make it easy for end users to do so themselves.
- Volume - This is the most understood aspect of big data. With more and more devices being internet enabled it is obvious that the amount of data we have to deal with is just growing to keep on getting bigger and bigger. It is easy for organisations to put in place policies that force users to only query data from a limited amount of sources that IT can keep up with and control. CIOs and BI Managers that follow this approach risk becoming irrelevant as self-service platforms and tools become more and more accessible to end users. Users will develop their own solutions and it will be very difficult to stop them. It is better to embrace these new sources. IT should focus on providing platforms that can process these large volumes of data.
- Velocity - This refers to the speed or rate at which data is being produced the rate at which the same data must be processed to meet demand. For example, if your business wants to respond quickly to retail trends then your need to constantly monitor the market rather than responding a month later when then information comes in. It is no longer acceptable to process data nightly or worse still weekly or monthly. Up to date data is more useful for predicting customer trends and remaining competitive.The time taken to make decisions is now shorter and users expect to have information that they can easily analyse at their fingertips.
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