Introduction

Business Intelligence as approach had a long history, but really booming has begun in the last ten years. Recent changes in business environment and customer behavior as well as globalization and increased competition, forced companies to look for new ways of improving business performance. Good business is leveraging on good decisions and good decisions is leveraging on good information potential. Business intelligence approach by definition promotes essential need of organizations to leverage their decision on fully information potential (derived from their data potential). Consequently business intelligence takes his place in business performance enhancement strategies and CIO priorities. Race has begun!

The major software vendors started the race in order to supply market with business intelligence technologies/platforms. Solution vendors flood market with wide number of solutions (data warehouse, OLAP & Data mining, Data visualization and so on). Everyone (vendors and organizations) was exited with this new technology wave and opportunities.

Optimism and frustration

As a result of business intelligence booming, organizations initiated a huge number of projects. Some of them are finished. Some of them are claimed as successful. However, les then 50% was truly successful. Latest economic crises is just emphasizes this problem, but not caused them.

What reasons caused such bad and definitely unexpected statistics? What is an actually success criterion for BI project?

Here is my point of view:

Maturity of the organization: BI solutions can be considered as an add-on on top of existing infrastructure. BI solutions must synergize people, processes and technology in order to provide maximum information potential for decision makers. Consequently, certain level of maturity in terms of business processes, organization and technology (especially in terms of data quality management) is prerequisite for BI projects. Organization unable to rich that level is not good candidate to apply strategically driven BI solutions. Since that BI is becomes a booming technology and such “booming” stuff are followed by lot of fog – many organizations having inadequate level of maturity consider BI projects as a way to solve maturity issue (as secondary aim). They are wrong and they are failed.

Business Focus: the major symptoms of unsuccessful BI projects are lack of tangible benefits, miss expectations and inadequate ROI. Business intelligence purpose is to provide support for business goals achievement. Consequently, organization should be aware (before the project) about where they are, where they want to be and how to get it. BI goals should be defined by represent tangible benefits for the organization. Therefore, business and IT professionals must know their business in order to be able to recognize, define and achieve BI implementation goals. It is common situation when organizations put BI focus on the technology/platform and underestimating business aspects of the whole story. That’s wrong - they will lose.

BI approach: BI projects have certain differentiation from other software projects. The main differentiation factor is business professional participation level. Unlike other software projects, BI projects require significant participation of business professionals. Consequently, BI implementation team should be composed from the right proportion of Business and IT professionals supported by at least one executive person (mentor). Moreover, successful BI initiative in the organization should be driven by strategic approach (and that means establishing single enterprise data repository as well as BI competence/excellence/knowledge center that matures over the time). Strategic approach considers BI initiative as a program, not a project.

Take lessons from winners

In summary, typical winners in BI game has following characteristics:

• Certain level of maturity in terms of business processes, organization and technology.
• Strategic approach in business intelligence, running Bi as a program, leveraging on enterprise data repository, data governance policy and procedures and driving by BI competence center the matures over the time
• Business and IT professionals within the organization know they business – they are able to recognize, define and achieve BI goals. That will result with tangible benefits for the whole organization and improves business performance.
• Business focus – they are focused on business instead on technology.

Conclusion

Despite the latest trends, BI is essential need for an organization. BI project failure, lack of tangible benefits and bad ROI is caused by organization’s immaturity for such kind of solution. Organizations which are mature enough to apply BI on strategic way have significant competitive advantage – they improve their business performance. They are winners. And that is a good motivation for the others.

How to reaching required level of BI maturity?

It is not big deal…start small, think strategically and systematically accelerate.