BI The Big Discrepancy

I attended a Gartner briefing on the 19th of November on the topic of Business Intelligence that promised their take on why many organizations still feel data rich and information poor.

The briefing took the form of two presentations.

The first was from James Richardson on the subject "Too Much Technology and Not Enough Intelligence".

James is an experienced BI man and has been in Gartner a couple of years.

His point was that BI has been #1 on the CIO list of priorities for many years and many companies have worked on it, but it hasn't delivered the expected results.

One repeated thought was that BI can't be an IT project, it needs to have heavy business involvement and ownership.

They also made the point that it shouldn't be a tools question. The technology is mature and the suppliers are established (7 of 13 main suppliers have been assessed as market leaders level, meaning that although they each have advantages there isn't a lot to differentiate them).
Organizations should have a BI strategy and then align the tool suppliers with that strategy, rather than choosing a supplier and doing whatever they are best at. Gartner, of course ;-), can help with this and there is a framework document on Gartner.com that will help you define the strategy.

There are many reasons for doing BI (reduce costs, increase speed, improve quality, etc). While these are all admirable the point that Gartner made was that they are to some extent mutually exclusive and you should decide on why you are doing BI and if you focus on that then that is how you will get success, trying to be all things to all people can be a recipe for disaster.

They feel that having a BI competency centre is critical to success. This is a joint biz/IT team that handles all aspects of the BI.

Fatal flaws in implementing BI
- if you build it they will come
- managers needing to "dance with the numbers" (the info that key spreadsheet jockeys have that creates individual departmental view of the data should be co-opted into the competency centre and included in the BI solution).
- data quality problem? What data quality problem? (need active data stewards who can articulate and communicate the problems and assumptions and meta-data about their data)
- Evaluate other BI platforms? Why bother?
- its perfect as it is - don't ever change
- let's just outsource the whole darn BI thing (but its a core competency so that's a bad idea)
- Just give me a dashboard - NOW!
- Err X + Y = Z, doesn't it (enterprise metrics framework based around biz values not technology)
- BI strategy - no thanks, we'll just follow our nose.

I thought that the dashboard approach may be a way to surface the differences in departmental views and definitions and also identify the key underlying technology issues, so i disagreed to a certain extent with that point, however the issue that was being made was that a cobbled-together dashboard could be retained forever rather than just being a short-duration trial and that may suck resources into supporting an inefficient and impractical solution.

The second half was given by Simon Greener and this was a view of a number of case studies.

In many ways this was much more the pitch for what Gartner can do and what services it can offer to help you on BI.

I didn't note as much from that presentation
- developing BI agenda needs clear strategy.
- conduct a BI maturity assessment (grades where you are on a scope of 1-5 on 3 dimensions)
- Heading for world class (level 5 on all 3 dimensions) may not be the best initial goal.
- BI strategy must be one that engages with the business - not by IT for IT about IT.

Corporate Performance Management systems were also mentioned as one of the solutions in certain circumstances.

The session ended with a pitch for the Gartner Business Intelligence Summit 2010.

all in all a good overview, maybe nothing earth shattering but interesting to hear the difference between IT and Business priorities mentioned again and again and really that's the key reason for the Big Discrepancy.

John Bryden
jb37432@yahoo.com