Less than 20% of business intelligence (BI) solutions will be implemented in entirety. This is according to Wayne Brider, manager, technology enablement, EOH Technology Consulting, who says companies implementing BI solutions place far too much emphasis on technical solutions and not enough on what organisational changes are required.
"Majority fail, not on technical implementation but, on the lack of business benefit. This equates to wasted resources and creates an environment where CEOs become wary of the promises made with regards to the benefits of IT."
Brider says to become knowledge-based organisations, and thus enjoy the true power of BI, issues such as business processes and how the BI solution will be used, who owns and is accountable for the integrity of the data, have to be addressed as they are often the most difficult obstacles to overcome.
"BI is only of value when action is taken based on the outputs of the solution. No benefits are derived from building a data warehouse in isolation," says Brider.
"The success of a BI solution is its sustainability, which does not only lie in the technical capability of the solution; it requires organisational structures such as BI competence centres, which provide the necessary operational support. This covers areas of end-user support, daily operational support and future enhancements."
If a data warehouse or BI environment is not evolving to meet ongoing needs of a business as its informational requirements mature, it has failed as a business tool.
Brider says there seems to be a need to differentiate BI into varying categories, which map to an organisation. For example, he says more organisations are implementing business process management systems (workflow).
"This is a real opportunity to make BI work for you. An automated process can utilise the various business models (expert systems) developed in the BI environment in a manner which ensures consistency in decision-making for routine tasks. Models such as customer pricing, credit scoring, fraud detection are typical examples."
It has implications though, says Brider, as BI now moves out of the realm of a nice to have and into a mission-critical system, requiring adequate infrastructure, process and people to support the solution.
The traditional BI solutions such as data mining and customer segmentation are also still required as it is in these areas that the business rules are developed for the expert systems.
Share
EOH is a business and technology solutions provider creating lifelong partnerships by developing business and IT strategies, supplying and implementing solutions and managing enterprise-wide business systems and processes for medium to large clients. EOH operates in the following three clusters of business units as a fully integrated business:
Consulting - Concentrated under the EOH Consulting brand are business units offering services ranging from strategic and business process consulting, project services, change management, supply chain optimisation and education. The EOH Consulting business unit is responsible for delivering IT solutions that make business sense. We focus on providing remarkable technology solutions using robust methodologies to perform along the following four dimensions of IT excellence:
* Business-alignment
* Quality
* Risk management
* Cost management
Technology - Through a number of subsidiary companies, EOH is able to sell, implement, and support a range of world class business applications including enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management, business intelligence, advanced planning and scheduling, e-commerce and manufacturing execution systems.
Outsourcing - EOH offers comprehensive maintenance and support of client`s IT infrastructure and applications through the rendering of full IT outsourcing, application hosting and managed services. In addition, EOH offers full business process outsourcing services.
EOH has a presence in all major centres in South Africa and Botswana, and operates in the rest of Africa.
Editorial contacts