Week 9

TOWARDS A SUCCESSFUL BI IMPLEMENTATION
http://www.infosysblogs.com/eim/2009/04/towards_a_successful_bi_implem.html

When companies grow they need systems that will streamline and optimize operation performance, help them in making better decision based on data and trends and come up with strategies that are in line with the business goals of the organization. This is possible through Business Intelligence.

In an effort to implement a BI system, companies either plan to (1) have a team that will be dedicated to write the software, (2) outsource the job of developing the systems to a vendor or (3) implement a product that will meet the BI requirements. Option (3) is, in most cases, better than option (1) and (2) because it can be implemented faster and in most cases will cost lesser.

The most important factors of a BI implementation is to know and understand why BI is required, the goals that should be met, the strategies that will help in meeting the goals and product that will fit the immediate and the long term needs of the organization. Reports say that companies, over a period of time have purchased and implemented different BI products under different leaderships. CIOs come and go and they leave their mark in the company in terms of a product implementation or changes to the software environment based on what they feel are the best.

This drains out the resources of the company and never gets them what they really want. In this article, I will try to focus on how a company can take the right steps to successfully implement a BI system that will meet the strategic business goals of the company.


Most of the companies get all their reporting needs by having someone write SQL queries against the database and export the reports to excel. When their business and database grow, their current systems fail to meet all their reporting needs. Some reports become very complex to be generated. Some might take a very long time to get generated. In such cases, companies typically give the responsibility of implementing a BI system to one of the IT managers who would then consult a BI product company or a System Integrator for advice and implementation.

During the engagement, a BI product is identified (not using scientific means, but in most cases driven by budget availability) and implemented to take care of their operational and other reporting needs. The advantage is that this approach will meet the short term goals and possibly improve report generation speed and also make the generation of a few complex reports possible.

But the disadvantage is that this approach (1) will not meet the long term needs (2) will not, in most cases, have full support from the management and the users because they don’t understand the benefits or none are consulted, (3) will be used mostly as a reporting system without taking the full advantage of BI features and (4) since the IT managers have minimal business knowledge the final system fail to deliver the expected business benefits.


Summary

This article is basically talking about to help the business in making better decision based on data and trends, it would be better to implement BI into the system. The article also mentioned that in order to do so, company either have a team to write the software or outsource the job to a vendor, otherwise implement a product that will meet BI requirements. It also mentioned about how CIOs may drain out the resources so it is important for company to take the right steps when implementing the BI system that will fulfill the strategic business goals of the company.


Comments

I think this topic teaches me a very important lesson which is even though you have all the resources and with the latest technology, a team that can work together and getting the support from the executives are crucial in making the implemenation successful. I think that it is important for the team to have a balance of skills whereby both business and IT people have to be in the team. As mentioned in the article, the final system will fail if the IT manager has minimal business knowledge as the systems fails to meet the expected business benefits. So this topic is very useful and important to business if the company wants to implement BI system.