Blogger: Lyn Robison
Business Intelligence is a hot topic. Enterprises are spending large sums on BI initiatives. Unfortunately, BI projects are failing more than they are succeeding. BI initiatives typically do not deliver their promised benefits. I just saw a survey that says almost two-thirds of companies that employ BI are being barraged with complaints that the system isn¹t doing what they need it to do. Another survey undertaken by the National Computing Centre found that only 13% of BI projects undertaken in the United Kingdom lived up to expectations. This figure is mirrored by a number of other studies.
We at Burton Group are coming out with some guidance soon that should improve your odds of success on your BI projects. In a few days we will publish a paper entitled, “The BI Iceberg: It’s What’s Beneath the Surface That Matters”. And within the next couple of months we will publish a BI maturity model that will help you evaluate the level of maturity (and by extension, the chances of BI success) in your enterprise. Maturity models are helpful because they are both descriptive and prescriptive. They are descriptive in that they help you see where you are. And they are prescriptive in that they help you see what you need to do next to make progress.
Having said this, however, I am concerned about BI’s future. With these high failure rates, BI seems to be on par with SOA. My friend and colleague Anne Thomas Manes wrote an obituary for SOA (here). I have to wonder, in a few years will someone be writing a similar obituary for BI? From what I can see, if we in enterprise IT don’t find ways to make BI projects more successful more often, BI is likely to die and take the careers of many BI professionals with it.
There is an alternate path: one that leads BI to success and prosperity. This alternative path runs counter to conventional thinking about how to implement BI systems. This alternative path to BI success truly is the road less traveled, and leads beyond business intelligence to reach business insight.
Professionals who embark on this alternate path understand that traditional BI is based on a false notion. The false notion is that it is feasible to take applications that were built to address localized requirements and stitch their data together (using data warehouses) into a larger picture that represents reality at the enterprise level. In the first place, the data from different apps won’t fit together. All of the king’s horses and all of the king’s men can’t put Humpty Dumpty’s data together again, because the data from individual apps was never designed to fit together in the first place. And in the second place, the chronic lack of data quality means that most application data tends to contain garbage anyway -– and garbage in, garbage out. This false notion that all you have to do in BI is pull together data from various apps is no doubt at the root of the high failure rates of BI projects. It usually can’t be done. And as the high failure rates attest, traditional BI simply doesn’t work.
The first step in this alternate path that leads to BI success involves understanding the relevant data. You have to understand what the data means, what it represents, how closely it reflects reality (its data quality), what part of the total enterprise picture it paints, what localized or provincial assumptions mar the data, who governs the data, how does the data and the part of the business it represents relate to other pieces of data and the parts of the business they represent, etc. In short, this alternative path to BI success requires BI professionals to switch from being software implementers to being enterprise data people.
BI systems are not the engine and data merely the fuel. Rather, BI systems are merely the mine shafts and the data is the gold. In this alternate path to BI success, you understand, optimize, and cater to the data, and the data is all but your exclusive focus. When BI professionals focus on building the data instead of on building BI systems, the systems they implement go beyond business intelligence – they yield valuable business insight, and that is BI success.
We at Burton Group have published lots of guidance and will publish further guidance in the future on how to treat enterprise data like gold. My hope is that we can save BI from the painful death that SOA experienced, and turn BI from Business Intelligence into Business Insight.
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