Johannesburg, 11 Jun 2008
Organisations spend a great deal of time, money and resources to get their users to adopt and make frequent use of their business intelligence (BI) tools.
First up is the acquisition cost which, while quite high, is the smallest cost component of the overall BI project. This embraces the licences; then follows the implementation cost, which is typically between two and five times the cost of the software.
Having gone live with the BI system, management finds to its dismay that users are not making regular use of it.
They are:
* Operating in their own silo, out of the corporate BI mainstream;
* Ignoring the costly BI system and engaging in what is known as "shadow IT", in effect duplicating the efforts, systems and resources of the IT department, and nullifying the investment;
* Using Microsoft Excel in preference to the corporate front-end standard; or
* Simply under-using the system.
Nigel Pendse, author of The BI Survey, reports an average of below 10% user take-up of BI, even when enterprise licences have been bought.
And reports from Computerworld`s BI Perspectives conference in September 2007 heard that companies have either missed the mark with users or simply not included them in their overall BI strategy and execution. The conference reported that in general, take-up of BI was under 15% in companies with delegates at the conference.
All of this flies directly in the face of the notion of "democratising" BI, a notion which has been promoted for some years now.
IT managers, as reported at the conference, struggled to convince users that BI tools are beneficial, and corporate executives that the technology offers return on investment.
The University of Utah Health Care said the organisation only recently "hit the mark with what the users wanted" - 14 years after the first BI tools were installed.
Similarly, we have come across many companies which claim to have had great breakthroughs with BI - only to find their BI systems were delivered at great cost (millions of rand), to few users, and with just 15 reports taking up to a year to design and deliver.
Adrian van der Merwe, MD of 8th Man Consulting, notes in his April column on ITWeb that companies are losing millions due to under-use of their enterprise software. And, back in the `90s, Ralph Kimball was a regular visitor to South Africa to audit and motivate Foschini`s users to make proper use of the Red Brick-based data warehouse.
There are three primary factors behind the reluctance of people to embrace their BI systems:
* They are too hard to use. They require a high level of skills, not least the ability to write SQL instructions. This barrier to entry is significant for business users. A far better approach would be to allow users to ask questions in natural English, as they do with Google; and, along with that, give them a user-friendly, familiar interface.
* Dependency on IT. Most organisations have a significant backlog in IT jobs, and this is particularly evident when it comes to BI, with users experiencing long delays between requesting a new report and receiving it.
* They don`t always trust the figures. Part of the promise of BI was that it would yield a single, unquestioned view of the truth. It has become increasingly clear to users that they can`t always trust the results of their BI systems.
So, before management signs off on further BI investment, or demands to know why they aren`t obtaining adequate return on investment, they would be well advised to address these three issues.
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