Midsize organizations often struggle with transitioning to business intelligence. As the business has grown, business users feel the increasing pain of reporting and analysis (or the lack of reporting) as data volume expands, the sources of information multiply, and achieving even basic business insight becomes more complex and time consuming. Despite this pain, they don't often understand that there is a better solution than cobbling together Excel spreadsheets or struggling with Microsoft Access.
The IT team understands the value of business intelligence, but is often pulled in multiple directions and doesn't have time to explain BI to business users, or engage in a lengthy, complex traditional BI deployment.
Here are some process and technology tips on achieving a happy outcome for all - a partnership between business and BI that gets reporting needs addressed, makes effective use of IT's precious resources, and ensures that the organization has a solution that will continue to serve its needs as the business changes.
IT makes the case -- the business case
IT can ride to the rescue of the business when it can speak in the language of the business user. So to move BI from the "nice to have" column to the "necessity" column, IT needs to make the case that BI is mission critical, as Cindi Howson points out in her recent InformationWeek article.
- Give the pain a name and an intensity. At the doctor's office, a nurse often shows you a pain classification chart, from smiley face (not painful at all) to a crying, frowning face (excruciating pain). This helps gauge what kind of solution is necessary. When kicking off a BI project, making a pain assessment can be helpful. For each department, calculate what it costs analysts to do a number of business processes manually versus the cost of automating it with business intelligence. This doesn't have to be overly involved - the labor costs of manual calculation alone are often compelling enough to consider BI.
- Identify the key pain points. Just like in acupressure massage, you don't need to treat the whole body for pain, just the key points. Gather the key metrics from each affected group, to ensure that you're answering the right questions - the ones that bedevil them every week. Avoid scope creep by focusing on the current set of desired metrics from manual calculation, and expand only a percentage from there.
Don't solve for everything at once. Massage the critical pain points.
- So this is what relief looks like! Imagining a BI-powered future can be a leap for some business users, who may not like the current system, but are comfortable with it. Marshal some statistics on how BI can improve decision-making and business results, without requiring large expense or deployment times. For example, Aberdeen is offering a free report for a limited time about the TCO of Business Intelligence. There are some great stats in here. For your free copy, click here.
Coming together on BI strategy
Once the business sees the potential value of BI, IT and business need to work together on creating a cohesive BI strategy for their particular case. This is a key piece, as IT executive acknowledged at the recent Gartner Business Intelligence conference. Main topics for discussion include:
- Key phases of the project and the goals for each
- Ensuring user adoption through training, deliverable requirements, and business process/culture
- Ongoing BI governance
Make sure that your solution meets the needs today and is future proof for tomorrow
Once the business case is made and the strategy is set, the last component is the technology. This is often an insurmountable hurdle for midsize businesses, since traditional BI solutions are often too expensive, complex, and IT resource intensive to be feasible.
However, new BI solutions can help to overcome these hurdles and deliver on the BI requirements and strategy. The three options available to the midsize organization are on-demand business intelligence, in-memory analytics, and open source BI tool technology. While all three are vastly more affordable than traditional BI, on-demand BI offers the most flexibility to meet increasing complexity and scale as a business grows.
On-demand business intelligence is faster to deploy than traditional solutions, often in weeks instead of months. It's also more affordable. As a monthly subscription that is only a fraction of the cost of traditional solutions, companies can avoid large upfront costs and only use what they need at that particular time. It also provides superior flexibility and scalability. There is no additional hardware to buy or IT resources required as the solution grows, and many solution, like Birst, can handle any data source that you throw at it, so it is extensible to multiple departments in your organization.
With the right mix of IT/business partnership, strategy, and technology, midsize organizations can finally achieve the business insight that they need.
