by Angela Guess
A recent article dispels three common business intelligence myths, the first being: “General IT workers know how to ‘do’ business intelligence.” The writer states, “Many IT shops try to retrofit a BI team out of people who appear to have some of the skills that you see listed in a Monster.com job opening for a BI professional. This is a recipe for failure as a general IT worker might be able to deliver a report to a user, but without proper data modeling skills, ETL knowledge, and OLAP cubing skills what will be delivered is what I like to call “Fake BI”. Fake BI can answer one or two business questions, but the minute the business wants to slice the data a different way Fake BI is exposed as incomplete.”
The second myth states, “IT can deliver business intelligence without the business’ involvement.” The writer counters, “When IT assumes it knows what the business needs, it delivers a solution that isn’t used by the business. This is where the business sponsor becomes the most valuable asset on the BI Team while not really being “on the team”. The business sponsor will be the one defining the business requirements, or working as a liaison between IT and the other business users so that the requirements are captured. If you can make the sponsor happy, they will become an evangelist for business intelligence and your program can continue to grow and deliver business value as other sponsors will come forward with requirements (and hopefully dollars) to drive the project forward.”
The final myth goes, “A BI project has a definitive end point.” The writer says, “General IT workers who live in an Application Development state of mind see all projects as having a beginning and an ending. Business Intelligence is a program, not a project so it is an ongoing process that is constantly evolving and adapting to the business needs as things change internally within the business and externally within the market. Businesses have to commit to a long-term strategy and vision in regards to their data and they need to view it as their most valuable asset. It is important that the business sponsor understand this fact, and if the value is being delivered through business intelligence by the development team this should be an easy thing to see for the executive leadership to see.”
