Evolution of the BI Market
I have been in the BI world since 1999 and have experienced the major changes in the BI industry. In February 2016, Gartner caused a stir in the BI software world with the release of its annual Magic Quadrant for BI and Analytics platforms. The report asserted that the market had reached "a tipping point as it shifts away from IT-centric, reporting-based platforms and toward modern BI and analytics platforms." The report divided business intelligence tools into two camps: the traditional enterprise reporting solutions versus and the newer self-service analytics tools. These new self-service analytics tools may be much more flexible and easier to use, but users still need to access governed data along with non-traditional data sources. Based on my understanding so far, the new business intelligence era requires not only self-service BI but also enterprise or traditional BI as well. Still, we will be providing our users a self-service BI environment along with central-governed BI which will make our task more challenging than before.
Despite all these changes in the BI market, one of the key components of the BI process is still the same: Business Requirements. This is the driving factor of all these changes and also in all our efforts in the BI implementation process. In the end, if whatever you delivered is not meeting the business' requirements, it doesn’t matter what you did in the backend. Despite the trend change in the BI domain with Self-Service BI, still, we will get some requests from users while trying to create some reports/dashboards by themselves using self-service BI functionality. These requirements may overlap with other enterprise/traditional BI requirements or they may be a different set of requirements related to the data source, data import, data wrangling, dashboarding, interface functionalities, performance, etc.
Prepare your BI Implementations for Success
Business requirements are sometimes not easy to understand, especially depending on who is communicating with businesses about their requirements and how this they translate these requirements into the technology/solutions/answers. Any gaps within this translation process can lead to bigger problems in the final deliverable because they did not cover all the expectations for the business users or BI goals of the organization. In some cases, the request should be addressed by taking into account some angles of the BI implementation or governance which may not be visible to the users. Sometimes, this miscommunication goes the other way and creates high expectations, which are another major problem at the end. In my 20 years of experience, I have seen many cases that refer to miscommunicated business requirements and a bunch of issues that have been triggered by them. As a result, the companies end up with high BI implementation and maintenance costs, and of course unhappy business users. In time, all these problems generate an unexpected BI culture in organizations too. In the long term, it is not easy to change this culture back to the ideal one. In most cases, these results are tied to the underlying BI tools such as Strategy by the business users or the management, which is not the case.
Find the Right Resources for your Project
When initiating a BI team, assigning the right roles to the individuals is a critical step towards a successful BI project implementation; providing the right level of support to the business users, and reducing the overall implementation cost and ROI. Depending on the BI strategy used (Enterprise/Traditional BI, Self-Service BI, or both), the same rule applies with slight changes. Let’s keep in mind that even Self-Service BI users are looking for support about the tool itself, data sources and best practices. Within Enterprise BI, especially the key role responsible for designing the solution, it is critical to find out the right solution or answer for the problem not only by keeping in mind the current impact but also the future impact of these solutions. We can also think of a similar kind of role for organizations that are doing only self-service BI. This person should have more than just specific BI tool knowledge, such as Strategy, but also database and ETL technologies along with multi-industry BI experience. I am aware that it may not be easy to find this resource all the time. It can be filled by resources from inside the organization or from outside as a contractor or Strategy Professional Services. Sometimes vendors may be an option as well but please keep in mind that a big name does not always mean quality. Having this resource is crucial to the success of BI efforts by addressing your business users’ requirements while reducing the overall cost of BI implementation and maintenance.
When it comes to finding the right resource for this critical role, there are a couple of criteria which may help to find the right candidate. Depending on your needs and industry, you may need to add more criteria to the list.
I understand the challenge of finding the right resource for this kind of critical role. Probably, the safest path to address this requirement is to use Strategy Professional Services along with an internal resource for knowledge transfer. Outside sources can be utilized as well to address this need. Regardless of which option you pick, having a yearly health-check with Strategy will help you a lot to identify the problems before they become a big issue for the organization.
A note from the Community team
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