Even though the economy is seeing some turn-around from the difficult times of the last five or so years and IT budgets are beginning to rebound, they are nowhere near levels of the heady days in the mid 2000’s. Back then, BI was the silver bullet that promised game-changing possibilities, and once it got its foot in the door, BI became one of the bright jewels in the CIO’s crown.
It’s not that way anymore. BI, like every other IT service line, must earn its keep and must also overcome the same barriers as other components of the IT landscape to achieve funding for viability and improvement initiatives. There’s no free pass for BI just because the promises of revolutionary data discovery and prescriptive analytics are being shouted from every vendor’s rooftop. Now BI and Data Warehousing initiatives are fighting for the same (relatively) limited CAPEX dollars as those involving supply chain systems, ERP, CRM, sales force automation, etc. BI can’t just waltz in anymore with slick dashboards, visualisations, and high-powered number-crunching and expect to get a blank check for upgrades or expansions.
So how does BI fight for survival when it’s competing against mission-critical applications? The key is a little bit of salesmanship, based in a firm understanding of BI’s value-add for the organisation. It’s true that the business may not grind to a halt if the BI system catches on fire tomorrow, but everyone agrees that the BI systems provide strategic competitive and operational value. This is the key insight ñ BI proponents can’t go in with a pitch that says, ìWe’ll all lose our jobs if this system fails, so we need to fund this initiative to improve/upgrade/expand it!î Instead they need to be more subtle.
As we’ve stated in previous articles, the key to an effective funding proposition for BI is business alignment. Involvement and co-sponsorship from an influential senior advocate outside the IT department can create a juggernaut of top-down influence to ensure resource availability and institutional commitment. Knowing that top brass are vested in the success of the effort can bring nay-sayers and gatekeepers into the fold.
The second component of that business alignment is bottom-up groundswell for the value proposition of the initiative, phrased using the vocabulary that the business understands! This part is another key ingredient: if the end-users and their line managers can’t see and agree that their work will be simpler, easier, faster, or more effective once the effort is over, then the entire process will be an uphill battle for adoption, compliance, and penetration. After all, how many organisations had well-intentioned solutions based on a clear understanding of the institutional need, that nonetheless ended up as shelf-ware because no employees were willing to use it?
The hard part for us as BI architects and evangelists is often overcoming our own desire to tell the business what the best solution for their need is and what tool will deliver it and instead being willing to let the users help develop the ìbattle planî with us by phrasing the value proposition in ways that resonate with them. But the most effective BI architects will see how these two approaches can lead to achieving funding for BI even when the purse strings are tight.
Mr. Briggs has been active in the fields of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for the entirety of his 17-year career. He was responsible for the early adoption and promulgation of BI at one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and developed their initial BI competency centre. He has consulted with numerous other companies about effective BI practices. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (Mass).
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