E-Book

Key trends in business intelligence

BI implementations are notoriously difficult, requiring the careful

coordination of business and technical resources. In this handbook for
project managers, get advice and insight for making your BI project
run smoothly. Find out more about the best practices that can make or
break a project – and hear more from experts and experienced
practitioners with real world experience. Both business and IT
professionals can benefit from this information, which includes:

• Advice on planning and scoping a business intelligence project

• Must have insight for BI project management professionals
• Detailed insight into one of the most critical success factors in
any BI implementation
• Expert insight into how to run training programs and ensure BI
user adoption

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Key trends in business intelligence
Table of Contents
Plan ahead, be realistic to keep BI projects on time and on budget

Business intelligence project management: Five must-have pieces of advice

The real deal on data integration for business intelligence

Practical training, executive buy-in key to BI user adoption

Resources from IBM

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Plan ahead, be realistic to keep BI projects on time

and on budget
By Jeff Kelly, SearchBusinessAnalytics.com News Editor

Perhaps no phrase strikes more fear in the hearts of IT managers than "over budget."

Unfortunately, with business intelligence (BI) projects, going over budget is more than just
an occasional occurrence, according to David Hatch, an analyst with Boston-based Aberdeen
Group.

"The fear of hidden costs has kept many companies from making and investment [in BI],"
Hatch wrote in a recent report.

Hatch said that companies often struggle to complete BI projects within a defined budget
and time frame, and they routinely underestimate the costs associated with maintaining and
enhancing BI systems once they're up and running.

In fact, 58% of the 191 companies responding to a poll accompanying the report have
experienced, or are experiencing, project time frames of a month or more, with 17% taking
more than six months to complete BI deployments. It is difficult to say how long a "typical"
BI deployment should take, but most analysts agree that executives are increasingly looking
for quick ROI results from BI projects, with deployments completed in weeks rather than
months.

Another 67% reported running over their BI project budgets, with nearly a quarter reporting
budget overruns of 10% or more. With the worldwide recession and tightening IT budgets,
any overrun could mean doom for a BI project.

That leaves around 40% of companies that completed BI projects on time and a third that
kept costs in check. Hatch identified five key areas that he said helped the companies that
excel at deploying BI stay on time and on budget.

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1. Realistically estimate project duration. BI vendors "often make claims that their
solution can be deployed in a matter of days or weeks, not quarters," Hatch said.
While often technically true, in order to achieve such quick deployment times,
companies must have defined processes for identifying, cleansing and integrating
data already in place. "Best-in-class companies are more likely to have these tasks
automated," Hatch said. Otherwise, BI deployments can take weeks, months or
longer, which should be understood at the start of the project.

2. Reach out to end users. In order to keep BI projects on time and on budget, it is
critical for companies to understand the data needs of end users. To do this, Hatch
says, companies must bring together all the stakeholders involved in a BI
deployment – IT, management, and end users – and he recommends creating BI
competency centers to do so. "When you get to a larger enterprise where the BI tool
is going to support multiple departments, you need to identify special needs and use
cases to avoid alienating subsets of end users upon deployment," Hatch said. "There
is a lot of project angst that goes on if this step is not performed well."

3. Establish formal training programs. To make the most of a BI deployment and

ensure end-user adoption, companies should establish formal training programs.
"Too many times, companies will roll something out only to find the technical savvy
and skill set to use it just aren't present," Hatch said. Creating a formal training
program and factoring its cost at the start of the project will probably save both time
and money down the road. "Training is a new cost entering the equation," he said,
"and if it wasn't budgeted for, you could have a problem."

4. Understand the impact on IT infrastructure. To prevent cost overruns,

companies should determine up front how the BI applications will be delivered, based
on end-user requirements, Hatch said. In some cases, it will be standalone
deployments; in others, BI apps will be integrated with other enterprise applications,
such as CRM and ERP. Either way, companies must consider the implications for their
IT infrastructure, and they must budget money and resources accordingly to avoid
surprises during deployment.

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5. Don't forget ongoing costs. Finally, too many companies fail to take into account
costs related to modifying BI systems as analytic requirements change over time.
"When business needs change, you have to change your reports," Hatch said. There
are also maintenance costs that need to be accounted for. Companies should invest
in BI systems that are easy to adapt as requirements change, he said, and factor in
the related financial and personnel costs at the start of the project.

Based on survey results, companies that followed these strategies consistently completed BI
project deployments on time and on budget, Hatch said. They realized "5.8% improvement
in on-budget completion of BI projects, more than five times the rate of industry average
companies," according to the report.

They also completed BI project deployments in around 14 days on average, three times less
than the average BI deployment time overall, and they took just over half a day to make a
change to existing BI reports or analytic views, compared with the industry average of just
over three days, according to Hatch.

Of course, automating data cleansing and integration processes itself takes time. It can take
months or longer for a company to get its data management house in order, and upkeep is
a never-ending job as new data sources emerge and old ones get left behind.

Creating a BICC and keeping user skills up to date are no easy – or quick – tasks either.
But, Hatch said, companies that put in the needed time on the back end will reap quicker BI
deployments – and less pain -- on the front end.

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Business intelligence project management: Five

must-have pieces of advice
By Mark Brunelli, SearchBusinessAnalytics.com News Editor

ORLANDO, Fla. -- You've been appointed the project manager of your organization's next
business intelligence (BI) software or data warehousing initiative. Now what?

According to attendees and a prominent speaker at The Data Warehousing Institute

(TDWI)'s conference here, there are five pieces of advice that will help you set priorities,
avoid conflict, empower BI project team members and generally make sure that things go
smoothly.

1. Find solutions by getting a handle on interests versus positions

In an interview following her presentation to TDWI conference attendees, Lorna Rickard,

chief workforce architect with Connect: The Knowledge Network, a Littleton, Colo.-based BI
and data warehousing consultancy, said that BI projects are cross-organizational in nature.
This means that BI projects cover many of an organization's departments, many different
interests and, oftentimes, competing interests, she said.

"But the way to get to good agreements is to understand the difference between your
interest and your position," she added.

Your position is something that you want. For example, a departmental representative at a
BI project planning meeting may say, "I want to be the first to receive this BI report." That
is his position.

His interest, Rickard said, consists of all the reasons he took that position. It's desires,
fears, the influence of his constituency -- everything that led him to take "position x" in the
first place.

"The value of interest versus position is that you can begin to understand what's important
and where you share common interests, and then it multiples the opportunity for solutions,"

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Rickard explained. "So, rather than me just trying to get A, now I recognize, you know
what, A, B, C, D may work for me."

To understand what people's interests are, all you have to do is ask them why their position
is important to them, Rickard said. At the BI project meeting, she said, you can even make
a chart of interests versus positions if you so desire.

"Understanding interest versus position gets people out of this lockdown," Rickard said. "We
really don't understand the problem until we understand the interests."

2. Understand the causes of poor performance, and provide constructive feedback

When the performance of your BI team falls below expectations, it's important to
understand the root cause in order to produce better results.

A recent University of Minnesota study found that a lack of feedback by team leaders and a
lack of clear expectations or goals are two of the biggest reasons why teams begin to
perform poorly. The study also found that poor working environments and a general lack of
skill in the project areas can be other contributing factors to team failures, although those
two issues come up significantly less often than the issues of feedback and setting
expectations.

BI project managers can have the biggest impact when it comes to providing feedback and
setting expectations, according to Rickard. Feedback should be provided early and often,
because it's better to ask for a minor course correction as problems occur, rather than doing
a dramatic project overhaul when things go south.

Positive feedback can be a powerful tool, Rickard said, but it has to be very specific. For
example, instead of saying, "Hey you did a great job," say something like, "Hey, I noticed
you got that report done -- it looks very complete. Several folks on the team have
mentioned that it's really helped them understand how this department's goals fit into the
division's goals."

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When it comes to setting expectations, Rickard said, it's important to provide team
members with a clear picture of what the successful outcome of a BI project will look like
once the initiative is completed.

3. Promote healthy tension

When it's time for the BI project team to look at substantive issues where there may be
differences of opinion, it's important to do it in a way that's healthy, she said.
Most importantly, that means working with more -- rather than less -- information.
"The less information you have, the more likely it is to evolve into opinion," Rickard said.
"Open up alternatives [because] the fewer alternatives you have, the more likely you are to
be polarized as a group."

Opening up more options and providing the maximum amount of information for the group
offers the added bonus of giving strong personalities a chance to rethink their opinions while
saving face, she said.

Along those same lines, don't be afraid to use humor, she added.

"Humor reduces defensiveness. It makes people forgive more, and they feel better about
themselves," Rickard said. "Even bad humor works. Just get people laughing and it will
help."

4. Avoid triangulation
Triangulation is a part of human nature that needs to be fought off, according to Rickard.
It occurs when one BI project team member has a problem with the performance of
another, but instead of approaching that person with the problem directly, he enlists the
support of the manager (you) or another empathetic third party.

"One of the most dangerous things to do in conflict is triangulate," Rickard said. "Instead of
going directly to the person that we have a conflict with, we go to someone else. We go to a
manager, we go to our friends, we go to someone who would be on our side -- whoever we
think is going to benefit us in some way."

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As a manager, if you're approached as the third party in this situation, it's important to tell
the person to approach the underperforming member directly and without being
judgmental. It's OK to offer to mediate the conversation, she said, but do everything
possible to have the conflicting parties work out their issues together.

"This kind of triangulation, it doesn't solve the problem. It keeps the system stuck because
[the underperforming team member] never gets the real feedback and it leads to collusion
and gossip," Rickard said. "Triangulation is like putting a drop of ink in the water. Even
though it's very small, it very quickly colors the whole thing. It's a very negative thing and,
as humans, we have to fight that [tendency] in ourselves."

5. Get legacy BI teams on board

When new BI project teams are formed, it's often because there is a business need for
information that hasn't been met by existing, or legacy, BI teams.

This can immediately lead to unhealthy tension between the new and old teams, said
conference attendee Rav Ravindran, manager of corporate analytics with Century Insurance
Group.

Ravindran said that mitigating this unhealthy tension is a matter of getting the new team to
collaborate with the legacy team in an open, mutually beneficial way.

"Collaborating with the legacy core team, building those relationships and getting on
common ground [is important]," Ravindran said. "You've got to get everybody on board
with the mission."

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The real deal on data integration for business

intelligence
By Jeff Kelly, SearchBusinessAnalytics.com News Editor

There are various ways to sabotage a business intelligence (BI) initiative, but perhaps none
is more effective than ignoring key data-integration considerations at the outset.

Data integration -- connecting data sources with data consumers -- lies at the very
foundation of BI, according to experts. But successful data integration is no easy task.
Poorly labeled data fields and siloed data sources, among other obstacles, see to that. BI
done right requires carefully selected data sources, particular attention to data quality, and
an understanding of the ultimate business uses of data.

"Business intelligence is all about data integration," said William McKnight, senior vice
president of information management at East Hanover, N.J.-based consulting firm
Conversion Services International. "You can't have effective BI without good data
integration or else you'll be running off different sets of books and encountering various
semantic and other cultural -- and very real – [obstacles] to success."

Ensuring a successful BI initiative requires attention to some key data integration

considerations, according to McKnight and Rick Sherman, founder of Stow, Mass.-based
business intelligence consulting firm Athena IT Solutions.

Get a grip on data granularities

BI users often want to drill down deep into data to gain better insights on the business. The
first step in any BI data integration project is to understand the granularities of an
organization's data in order to agree upon definitions, McKnight said. That way, when users
delve into the data, they are all working off a common framework.

In a retail company, for instance, what exactly defines a customer? Is it a single person or
the entire household? If another member of that household makes a purchase, is he or she
a new customer or part of the existing household customer account? Questions like these

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must be addressed before integrating data into a BI system, McKnight said. How they are
answered will largely depend on a company's business model and corporate culture.

Not all data sources are created equal

The next step is to take an inventory of data sources – databases, data warehouses,
spreadsheets, etc. It is important to realize that different departments often have their own
internal databases and spreadsheets that contain overlapping information, which can lead to
problems with data quality.

"A lot of companies have grown up in silos and now are looking to integrate data to get a
holistic view of the business," McKnight said. "That means there are different cuts of the
data taken off in different departments, sometimes with their own IT departments or their
own rogue IT departments." Before data can be integrated, he said, these various data
sources must be reconciled.

Athena's Sherman also stressed the importance of data quality in any integration initiative.
Prior to the implementation of a BI system, he said, users in separate departments probably
routinely make changes to data to suit their purposes -- changes that are not relayed to
other business units. That's fine when the data never leaves a given department, but can
wreak havoc on BI systems that access enterprise-wide data.

"They massage the data to make up for data quality issues, or gaps in the data, or things
they don't think are right in the data," Sherman said. "Once you [undertake] a BI initiative,
then you want to look at more detailed data, from across different systems. That's when
you start to see data quality issues."

Foster buy-in from BI stakeholders

In conjunction with addressing data quality issues, executives and analysts should also be
consulted to determine how they plan to use the resulting BI reports, analytics and
dashboards.

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"You need to pick data sources appropriately for the stakeholders of BI," McKnight said.
"And they should understand the choices that they have to pick from within the
organization."

Understanding how data will be used is essential to successful BI data integration, Sherman
agrees, but understanding data lifecycles is equally important.

"The lifecycle of your data is very closely related to your business processes," Sherman
said. Data used by a manufacturing company, for instance, undergoes very different
processes throughout its lifetime than data used by a retailer. Even within industries, data
lifecycles often vary. Both Sherman and McKnight said knowing when to integrate data for
BI purposes during its lifecycle is a key success factor.

Only after data source options are clear, data quality issues have been addressed, and BI
business uses determined, can an organization actually begin integrating data with BI
systems, McKnight and Sherman agreed.

The reason why some BI projects take so long, sometimes nine months to a year or longer,
"is due to getting business users to determine how they're going to define and use the data,
plus assuring data quality and writing data governance rules," Sherman said. "Business
intelligence really raises the bar for data integration."

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Practical training, executive buy-in key to BI user

adoption

By Jeff Kelly, SearchBusinessAnalytics.com News Editor

During any business intelligence (BI) deployment, organizations focus on the technical
details – for example, determining the number of servers needed to support the system,
choosing the data sources to be integrated, and deciding how often to refresh the data
warehouse.

But in a BI deployment aimed at non-power users, addressing cultural barriers to ensure

that the system is actually adopted throughout the enterprise is often just as important as
mastering the technical specifications. Giving short shrift to these non-technical concerns
could result in a BI manager's worst nightmare – a successfully installed, complex and
expensive BI system that no one uses.

While power users, like business analysts, need little incentive to adopt BI technology, more
casual BI users, such as marketing and sales associates and line-of-business managers, are
a different story, said Mark Smith, CEO and executive vice president of research at Ventana
Research in Pleasanton, Calif.

For adoption to truly take off among these users, it is important for IT and BI staff to
educate them on how the technology will help them achieve personal and departmental
business goals, Smith said. Less important to these users are the BI system's various eye-
catching features that might impress a more sophisticated user.

If a salesperson has a goal to find a certain number of new customers in a quarter, for
example, the BI staff should show him or her how the new report or dashboard will help
achieve that goal, rather than giving a lecture on how many different views of the data are
available.

"You have to give hardcore examples," Smith said. "Don't get into a features and functions
conversation. Don't bore them with a lot of gory details. Get them excited."

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That strategy has worked for Sandy Yang, a BI functional analyst at a large daily newspaper
in Canada. The paper uses SAP Business Information Warehouse to monitor some
operational processes as well as analyze circulation and advertising rates. Yang said she and
her colleague – the BI staff numbers just two – regularly hold training sessions for small
groups of workers to answer questions about the system and to show how to apply it to
their professional goals.

"Training is very important because [there are] a lot of things people don't understand,"
Yang said. "[And] we really try to do it as soon as possible [for new users]." An untrained
user could get quickly frustrated with the system, she said, making it that much harder to
get him or her to embrace the technology later on.

Yang used group and one-on-one training sessions to teach branch managers how SAP BW
could help them monitor customer satisfaction rates regarding home delivery of the paper,
for example. She showed them how to identify delivery problem areas and drill down into
the data to determine whether the problems were caused by the carrier or logistical issues.

"We got a lot of good feedback from people saying, 'Hey, we had a lot of fun doing BW.'
That's the kind of response we want to have," Yang said.

IT and BI workers also must take into account how workers in the organization traditionally
collaborate with one another, Ventana's Smith said. "For IT folks trying to make BI useful,"
he said, "they have to understand culturally how teams of people like to work together."

At companies where workers are comfortable with blogs, IM and wikis and often
communicate using them, for example, the BI system should incorporate those
communication tools, Smith said. Especially among workers in their 20s and 30s, the so-
called Facebook generation, a lack of Web 2.0 tools integrated with BI systems could
definitely hurt adoption rates, he said.

How workers collaborate now is not the only concern, Smith said. With BI deployments
meant to last three to five years or longer, IT and BI workers must also anticipate how
communication patterns are likely to develop in the future.

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"[Companies] want BI systems to last three or four or five years," he said, "so they need to
think about all the things that BI has to react with inside the organization."
Ken Allard, a retired Army colonel who now lectures on business management at the
University of Texas at San Antonio, said he thinks the key to spurring adoption of BI
technologies among casual users is for executives to lead by example.

"'Non-power users' are actually responding predictably to the incentives mandated

elsewhere in the corporate hierarchy -- and if the boss isn't persuaded of the merits of
intelligence, then don't expect much from the munchkins either!" Allard said in an email.

The best way to sell corporate executives, and ultimately casual users, on BI is "by real-
world war-gaming and simulations, which can provoke seminal 'a-ha' moments," Allard said.
"[That is] the best and maybe the only way to demonstrate the merits of real business
intelligence."

At the Canadian newspaper, executives were having trouble understanding circulation

reports. The data just "didn't mean anything to them," Yang said. Recognizing the
importance of executive buy-in to maintain BI funding and to encourage wider adoption of
the technology, Yang and her colleague set about building "a very useful, powerful
dashboard to tell them the story."

But whether it's focusing on practical training, facilitating communication, or getting

executives to lead by example, Yang urged IT and BI staffs to remember that promoting
end-user adoption of BI systems is an ongoing process, and not an easy one at that.

"It's not going to be done in one day or two days," Yang said. "It's hard."

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Resources from IBM

Key considerations for business intelligence platform consolidation

Key trends in business intelligence

BI implementation project management best practices

About IBM
At IBM, we strive to lead in the creation, development and manufacture of the industry's
most advanced information technologies, including computer systems, software, networking
systems, storage devices and microelectronics. We translate these advanced technologies
into value for our customers through our professional solutions and services businesses
worldwide. www.ibm.com

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