Success In The Business Intelligence Game

By Jamie Oswald, Published on October 1, 2012

I’ve been hearing quite a lot about business intelligence (BI) success lately, and it’s become very clear to me that success means different things to different people.

However, before we can determine whether a BI project was successful, we should decide what business intelligence success looks like.

What Is Business Intelligence Success?

Business intelligence success isn’t just about the technology. Making the right information available to the right people at the right time isn’t enough if they won’t/don’t use it. You can tell whether your business intelligence initiatives are successful by the value of the information-driven decisions that are now being made within the organization.

How will you know if business users are making decisions based on data? Oftentimes, you’ll know it by how bad a day your business intelligence or IT team is having. When business users are banging on IT’s door with issues, delays, and ideas, that’s a good thing, because you know they’re using the tools you’ve provided.

What Isn’t Business Intelligence Success?

A lot of BI professionals spend a lot of time trying to kill spreadsheets in the workplace and measure success around their decreased use. Let’s save some time here. End-users aren’t going to give up their spreadsheets. Instead, we should focus on integrating Excel into a more governed process.

The other mistake a lot of BI professionals make is measuring success by how many people log into their portal. Why should we care if they log into a specific website? We want people to get their data where they need it. Sometimes they need a centralized portal. Sometimes they need it in the middle of a process. And sometimes they need it in an email. Wherever the business needs information is where BI should deliver it.

When Is BI Done?

Due to the changing nature of business and the need to integrate more and larger data sources, the process of BI within a company will be “complete” right after we’ve solved world hunger, invented the better mousetrap, and fashioned a pair of skinny jeans that don’t look ridiculous. Jason Robards said it best in the 1989 classic Parenthood, “There is no end zone. You never cross the goal line, spike the ball, and do your touchdown dance.”

The good news? In BI, as in life, success begets success. So, each time it gets a little easier.

  • http://twitter.com/timoelliott Timo Elliott

    Good timing — I just hosted a session today for the Vancouver Customer BI strategy session on “information culture”.

    One key issue that came up: If you believe that one of the goals of a “world class analytics team” would be to permanently improve the information culture of the organization, you’re immediately confronted with a classic BI problem: how to measure it…

    As a group, we decided that most of the “hard numbers” that you can easily measure (usage, etc.) are not necessarily relevant, since more intelligent use of Excel should matter as much as access to a standard BI tool. And as one participant mentioned “my dashboard is all green — but the users are unhappy”

    It might be better, therefore, to do a more qualitative survey on a regular bases, including interviews with business users and open-ended questions.

    One of my favorite measures is how much your BI is changing — if your reports have remained untouched for years, then clearly nobody is reaching out to take them to the next level. But as one participant pointed out, if you have a two-tier system, with standard reports and ad-hoc reports, business people may be advancing their level of analytics without you knowing it…

    The group wondered if it would be possible to come up with a crowdsourced “example survey” — all input and ideas welcome!