There is increasing pressure for organisations to show concrete benefits from investments in business intelligence (BI) technologies and this has resulted in a high demand for BI skills.
This is according to a BI specialist at IQ Business Group, Sean Eekhout, when giving his talk yesterday at the ITWeb BI Summit at Vodaworld in Midrand.
He said South African companies are keen to deploy BI because they realise it can enhance and extend an enterprise's business applications, resulting in a better-managed enterprise.
However, he said there is still a high failure rate in BI projects and their overall success is questionable. “This is because there are not enough skills when these projects kick off and in turn, the projects are not fast enough.”
He added that success is often determined by 'non-technological' things - people, process, leadership and culture.
Skilled BI specialists like analysts, data modellers and data warehouse analysts are in demand. “Success depends on best practice and lessons learnt which only comes with years of experience,” he added.
For a BI project, staff selection is crucial, and a business should get people who are information hungry and knowledgeable about business and industry.
“Business should be sure to mix skills which cover the whole organisation - from finance, sales and technical to supply chain. These people should be intelligent and have analytical ability. They should also be intuitive, innovative thinkers,” he pointed out.
He noted that if businesses get the right people in the right positions, then they will figure out how to take the project to the right place.
Eekhout said the consequence of poor BI skills is that if IT cannot provide the insight from incomplete data, business will make assumptions. He added that this will have disastrous consequences for businesses, as was seen during the global economic meltdown.
A major hurdle Eekhout points to in implementing BI is the shortage of skills, as it is difficult to define roles in the BI space. Most BI projects must integrate the requirements, data and priorities of the organisation, as well as multiple business units, which require unique skills.
“There is a general lack of clarity with regards to specific roles and responsibilities, and the associated skills and competencies within most BI environments,” he explained.
Most organisations have difficulty finding people with the right skills, situating them in the right place or leveraging available skills across projects and business units, he added. “Organisations lack the skills and commitment for managing, implementing and supporting significant cross-functional BI projects.
“If they have the skills, they're spread throughout the organisation, with priorities placed on efforts other than BI. This results in projects that do not achieve their full potential and that cause a great deal of organisational strife,” he added.
Eekhout said international research by Gartner, shows BI is still one of the top five issues on CIO agendas for 2011. “This research has listed BI analysts as one of the top 10 jobs globally for 2011.”
He suggested organisations look to BI competency centres (BICCs), which are essential because they address critical challenges such as staffing, planning and resource acquisition.
Business intelligence's success depends on the formation, organisation and staffing of a BICC, he said. “As BI projects continue to gain strategic importance, we explore the issues surrounding the planning, staffing and politics of the BICC."
Eekhout also said BI is a difficult environment to work in due toconstant change, the need to manage unstructured data, as well as maintenance of suitable governance and compliance over data.
There are always new regulations coming in; keeping the governance structures in place is going to be a nightmare, he said. “Organisations will need to make bigger investments in higher level governance activities, which are in the information security and compliance space,” he said.
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