The elephants trunk

In this day and age, if you don't use your data, you stand no real chance of keeping a successful business. This is why deciding whether to implement BI is a no brainer. When this is the company's first attempt most probably their business people are not that sophisticated and most managers forrage data from various sources and start building their mini BIs long before the company even thinks about a centralized BI solution.Usually they look at two options:

1) They start gathering internal resources to build a team of technicians that will be assigned this task.

2) They look for a vendor to implement it for them.

The first option is by far the most natural one. The team will probably be made from some DBAs that know the data source. They read some architecture book(Kimball or Inmon), they think they understood what BI is all about and then start building a data warehouse. After that is built, they might look at existing operational reports or some standard reports they might find on the Internet and start building those. In the mean time, the IT manager keeps getting asked about the project and he updates on the status in his native technical tongue. The business board members don't understand much of what he is saying will come but act like they do and instead build their own expectations. They think of their Excel stuff and hope that they will be able to pull the source data from the new BI solution. GO Live comes and people are eager to dig into the new solution. They like the look of the new reports but always ask where the export to excel button is. That is when reality strikes :)

What went wrong? How could they not foresee this? Some business grow faster than they evolve from a procedural and control perspective. They have money and they have resources but they lack internal communication. They go head first into BI, thinking it's a technical project and somehow that system will be the answer of all prayers because they heard that is what AI, and BI and ML is all about. When the project fails, they go for the second option. But I will talk about that on my next post.

Lesson learned: Manage expectations. That will prevent you from learning other expensive lessons later down the road.

How to avoid this: Impossible. Everybody learns the hard way :)

Stick around for more posts if you want to understand #WhyBI