Comments on: *** Company-Wide BI

By: James Taylor

James Taylor — Wed, 30 May 2007 23:03:37 +0000

I do not believe that adding more users to existing BI tools will add enough value to justify it’s costs. In fact, when I hear about companies adding more and more users to their BI tools I have to ask why? (as I did here – http://www.edmblog.com/weblog/2006/04/users_look_to_o.html – when I read about companies providing BI to their custoemrs and partners).
You need your business to make better decisions. If all your decisions are made manually by people who can, eventually, learn to use BI tools then perhaps adding more users will help. But might it not be more effective to stop giving people reporting tools and instead make their systems smart enough to be useful?
JT
http://www.smartenoughsystems.com

By: Jim Novo

Jim Novo — Wed, 30 May 2007 14:08:02 +0000

I think we’re in synch. If I define a “best practices analytical team” as headed by a Chief Analytics Officer reporting directly to the CEO as here:

http://blog.jimnovo.com/2007/02/14/medium-metric/

does that make you feel any better about the “vetting” thing? Sorry if I was a bit vague on this, what I was trying to say is if you are going to roll out a company-wide BI initiative, you must have some kind of “3rd party” analysis verification team at a very high level to make it really work; otherwise, you will get analytical chaos as everybody tries to torture their own analytics in their favor.

By: Ron Shevlin

Ron Shevlin — Wed, 30 May 2007 13:27:00 +0000

I’m not sure we disagree what a strategic analysis is — but we didn’t define it. So that’s where our not-meeting of the minds probably lies. Not only would I be worried to see a company trust a strategic analysis to a “director-level silo player”, I’d be worried to see a company force that analysis to be vetted by a bunch of “director-level, metadata modeling, techno-BI geeks”. No insult intended. In that case — the strategic analysis was probably a huge waste of time and effort.

By: Jim Novo

Jim Novo — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:38:24 +0000

Ron, given we agree on what a “strategic analysis” is, show me a company that is willing to trust this kind of analysis to a Director-level silo player without some kind of vetting process and I’ll show you a company that doesn’t really manage by the numbers.

In other words, they’re going to ignore the analysis and go with their gut anyway – unless, of course, the analysis supports what the (ample?) C-Level gut already says.

If that’s the case, “company-wide BI” is a huge waste of time and effort.

By: The Big Integration » did you really think a customer was a customer?

The Big Integration » did you really think a customer was a customer? — Tue, 29 May 2007 17:10:10 +0000

[...] Great post today by Jim Novo about data modeling. Even the offline world is faced with data definition challenges. Having more than one definition of what a customer is within an organisation seems to be a problem, like us in web analytics with several of the metrics. [...]

By: Ron Shevlin

Ron Shevlin — Tue, 29 May 2007 12:42:01 +0000

Imagine for a moment that you are a C-level business executive (not technology) in a medium to large organization. Now think about how many people in your firm use BI tools. You can’t, can you? Because you HAVE NO IDEA how many people use BI tools.

I also seem to recall a survey done in 2005 that predicted that by 2007 there would be a sixfold increase in the number of firms where half or more of employees used BI tools.

Or was that a 2003 study predicting 2005 use?

Regardless of the validity of the survey, your prescription is right on, Jim — up to #3. Vetting strategic analyses through a best practices team just isn’t going to happen in most firms.