Giving business intelligence a human face - getting user buy in

By Jim Mortleman

Get your business information (BI) strategy right, say suppliers, and you will be able to better forecast and plan for the future, increase sales and improve operational efficiency.

But get it wrong and you may find you've thrown away money and effort on expensive solutions that leave business users frustrated and fail to deliver any significant competitive advantage.

Organisations clearly realise effective BI is critical, even (or perhaps especially) in the current downturn. Gartner polled 1,500 worldwide CIOs earlier this year and found BI was their top spending priority, as well as one of the few areas largely unaffected by the budget cuts sweeping boardrooms.

So how can companies avoid the pitfalls and ensure their focus on BI delivers the results they're hoping for? The most critical issue, experts agree, is not your choice of tools and technologies, but getting buy-in from users and ensuring you have effective, ongoing governance in place.

The goal is to ensure business users can access the right information as and when they need it, as easily and in as timely a fashion as possible - which should increasingly mean without having to go through the IT department.

Clive Longbottom, a principal analyst at Quocirca, says: "A lot of organisations are sitting there with set reports embedded in their applications. If a report isn't quite what a user needs, they have to go to IT and request changes, which invariably takes too long.

'Such an approach just isn't enough to support businesses going forward. BI has to be as much under the control of users as possible. IT is generally the constraining factor, as they often don't understand exactly what it is the business user wants so the problem has to bounce backwards and forwards several times, by which point things have moved on and the information generated is no longer useful."

This has all sorts of implications for BI projects. Jon Ainsworth, Oracle's business development director for EMEA, says: "It's absolutely critical to have an executive sponsor for a BI project who will drive it forwards among middle management to ensure they make a serious time commitment, are involved from the very start and continue to be so.

'When you're rolling out BI, don't just do a bit of training and walk away. Appoint a formal departmental champion for each sub-group of users - someone they can go to for immediate help without having to rely on IT.

'Ongoing, long-term commitment to resources is essential, as is the recognition that BI strategy needs constant review and change. A BI project is never over because it is a reflection of your company stratgy, which is always evolving. A static system is a dead (or dying) system."

But he accepts that different organisations will be at different stages of maturity with their BI capability. Best practice, Ainsworth says, is to develop a BI competency centre within the organisation to deal with all aspets of BI strategy, sourcing, implementation, management and training.

"You need to approach BI incrementally, not as a big bang. BI competency centres reflect the truth that BI is not an IT project, but needs to managed very close to the business. A competency centre needs to be responsible for the IT portion of BI, but also has to drive skills and standards right across the business and, most importantly, have a charter to link together technology, people and business processes. In other words, you need to treat BI as a business enhancement and change management process rather than just an IT project.

Best practice

All major BI vendors now have capability maturity models to pass on best practice and help their customers get the best from their BI investments in incremental steps that show benefits at each stage. And all of these maturity models recognise that, in addition to technical steps such as data cleansing and integration, getting users to buy into and use the systems is critical.

Richard Kellett, head of customer marketing and operations at SAS, says: "As with all these things, if people can't see any personal gain then it's difficult to get them on board. Spell out to everybody what's in it for them.

'How is this going to make them more of a hero in the organisation, how will it put more pennies in their pocket and how can you demonstrate that to them very rapidly? You need to give them some information or insight that they wouldn't have had before and which allows them to do their jobs better."

But there's plenty that can scupper your chances of getting that buy-in. First, BI will only work if your organisation has the right culture. "If your company works on gut instinct and the opinion of the CEO , all the tools you put in place will make no difference," says Kellett.

You also need to segment different types of users and give them appropriate levels of training and access.

"Putting a really advanced forecasting tool in front of a call centre operative is completely pointless, for example. When they're on a call you want them to get a 'next best offer' fed through to them by the business process and technology in the background," he says. Other more skilled users will want options to slice, dice and visualise information according to their own business needs.

But if you want users to buy into BI for the long term, rather than just at the scoping stage, you also need to manage expectations and ensure you don't try to run before you can walk.

Kellett says: "If you put in place a really snazzy query and reporting tool but it is isn't linked to real-time operational data that's clean and accurate, for example, then you'll get historical snapshots that may not be relevant. That can cause users to question whether they've made a wise investment. For an organisation still immature at BI, attempting to reach the end goal in one go is a big mistake - you've got to get there step by step."