By “critical mass” I’m referring to the failure to advance from a tactical / departmental level of usage, to true adoption of the BI platform at an enterprise level.

In my experience, every organization starts out with enterprise-wide goals, but often ends up with a departmental deployment and is unable to scale beyond that. There’s no ROI… Excel is still the reporting tool of choice… IT staff are still the “Report Developers”… and more, so the obvious questions we should be asking are:

Why does this occur?

Having done many BI (Information Management) Assessments I see some common threads, most often amongst small to mid-sized businesses.

1)      Excel was the only reporting tool prior to the BI deployment, and business users refuse to budge off Excel,

2)      IT ‘justifies’ the BI tools internally based on technical merits and not on the business process benefits,

3)      High costs and/or resource constraints are a barrier to a broad-based deployment, or

4)      IT & business users did not start out with a BI Roadmap with incremental deliverables over time.

There is plenty of blame to spread around, but I fault IT for not taking the role of technology leadership.

What actions can we take?

I did an Assessment recently that fit several of the above points. In this case, the entrenched enemy of BI was an MS-Access / Excel application, the internal workings of which were only known to 2 people in Finance. During the Assessment we found over 10,000kgs of a product sitting in a warehouse, that didn’t meet the specifications of any customer. Meaning, the product could not be sold without re-manufacturing.

The response from the CFO was… “How would deploying the reporting tool have prevented this from happening?” It’s a reasonable question, but misses the mark. Without the Query & Analysis capability, 10,000kgs of product would still be sitting in a warehouse, and MS-Access / Excel didn’t or couldn’t high-light the problem.

What a perfect opportunity for IT to; a) build an ROI for BI, and b) point out the deficiencies of MS-Access / Excel as a reporting environment…  Sadly, IT completely missed the opportunity.

For this reason I tend to find fault in IT. It’s not enough to be the technical guardian of IT resources any longer. The role of IT should be evolving to that of a technical solution provider, and the value a consulting company can bring is to provide advice, recommendations and leadership during the evolution.

I’m interested in hearing of other experiences, both from an IT perspective but also from a business viewpoint.