In his article: “Five rules for BI success”, Kevin Quinn talks about why so many companies find that only a small percentage of their employees are actually able to benefit from BI tools, while, despite best efforts, the rest of the organisation remains “unintelligent”?
Quinn believes the main reason for this is a lack of understanding of people. His number one 'rule' for successful BI implementations centres on understanding the user. Quinn compares consumers of information in an organisation to cars to help illustrate his point. In his analogy, he compares:
* Business users to drivers
* IT programmers or developers to mechanics at a service station
* Business analysts to drivers capable of moderate maintenance, such as rotating the tyres, changing the oil, etc
* Power-users to drivers capable of heavy maintenance on their own cars
Most business users don't want to search for and analyse information, just as most drivers don't want to work on their cars. If you ask people capable of doing this how often they bring their cars to a service station, you find that more than half bring them in for a service as needed. This also applies to most analysts and power-users. Even though perfectly capable of producing and analysing their own information, they often still go to IT for this.
Why? They don't think that spending hours analysing data is making good use of their time. Even when given the tools to create their own reports, they still want information access to be an easy and non-invasive process.
And so everyone wants information to come to them as easily as starting and driving their cars - not fixing them. But if you really want service with a smile - make sure that the vehicle you get in the first place is the right one - preferably built to meet your own, very specific needs. This is very much the ASG approach: put the user first; understand what they need from a holistic process perspective, then work together to come up with a simple and practical BI solution.
It's so easy to get carried away by what the technology can do, that we quite often forget we don't often need all of it in the first place. Or if we do, we try to do it all at once - resulting in expensive, lengthy implementations and overwhelmed users.
Understand your user needs, develop or review your existing BI strategy in the context of those needs and put together or revise your roadmap accordingly. Then think about the system that you need to make it happen.
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