Business intelligence tools up for the recession

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Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Nov 2008 12:22 GMT

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...over whose views should be accommodated first. Conflicts can arise from issues such as defining common terms — 'revenues', for example — or agreeing which particular business unit owns a certain piece of data.

As a result, Andreas Bitterer, a vice president of research at Gartner, says setting up a BI competency centre is a must, not least to raise the profile of BI in the organisation and to give any new programme teeth. However, he acknowledges that few enterprises have implemented this measure.

"If BI is important to an organisation, there's no way it can just do it on the side. There has to be some form of governance body, whether it's called a programme office, competency centre or whatever," he says.

"The aim is to build a bridge between IT and the business to define a roadmap for action. It's hard and people will get bloody noses in the process, but it's about ensuring that money is spent wisely for business benefit," Bitterer adds. 

Such competency centres should be staffed by eight to 12 people for an enterprise of 3,000 heads and include representatives from IT, as well as business stakeholders from areas such as finance, sales and marketing.

Their role is to define and articulate requirements and to decide who needs what information and where. It is also important to audit the information that supports these goals and assess its quality, to ascertain whether it should be cleansed, aggregated or supplemented, perhaps by third-party sources.

However, after defining a strategy, competency-centre members must devise a business case for each project and then prioritise projects according to potential benefits rather than on the basis of who shouts the loudest.

These initiatives are large change-management programmes and must be managed as such. "One of the fatal flaws is that people believe: 'If we build it, they will come.' People have to be involved from day one or they'll show resistance to changing anything; it's one of the biggest roadblocks," explains Bitterer.

Overcoming resistance
So, while the benefits of carefully defined projects should ideally be self-evident to end users, if resistance remains an issue, another approach is to hit managers in the pocket.

"You can say: 'If you don't want to change, it will cost you this much. If you keep your old tool, you'll be charged this much by the helpdesk for sitting outside the BI standard.' As soon as people feel it in their wallets or budgets, it's a good lever for change," Bitterer says.

PA Consulting's Taylor says BI-related processes must also be embedded into the way the business is run. That integration could include setting weekly or monthly performance objectives for staff, based on BI findings. "Unless there's a regular feedback loop, how can people change their behaviour to fit corporate aims? Annual feedback just isn't enough," Taylor says.

Another factor to bear in mind is that enterprise BI programmes run over many years and their sheer complexity means they cannot be undertaken in one fell swoop. Once begun, they also never end.

Gartner's Bitterer says conditions change, whether through external regulations, an internal shift of strategy or the acquisition of another company. "That means BI programmes continually need to change too and so they're never finished," he concludes.

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