Watch Out for Business Intelligence "Gotchas"

When it comes to commentary with valuable real-world insights, I can always count on the participants at my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats on Fridays. I kicked off a recent discussion with this question to the group: “What are the top five worst practices in business intelligence?”

It took only a few minutes for them to toss out a lot more than five. As I commented then, there are a bunch of successful overachievers who participate in #BIWisdom tweetchats!

I certainly don’t want to minimize the great successes organizations are having with business intelligence. But it’s a fact that some BI initiatives sputter. So let’s look at why a BI initiative sometimes doesn’t fully deliver on its promise. Failures, after all, are very instructive.

So here’s the list we compiled —
Some of the worst mistakes organizations make in BI initiatives

Technology/tools:
" Thinking the BI toolset will make up for not understanding the business
" Thinking BI tools will solve the business problems instead of using BI to solve the problems
" Generalizing solutions or tools for all types of users – BI is not a one-size-fits-all type of solution and many “tend to implement bright shiny objects with no real understanding of whether or not it’s a good fit with their organization”

Data:
" Thinking that data quality is a technical problem
" Thinking that data quality is not everyone’s concern
" Assuming some nice-looking charts from bad underlying data is actually good BI
" Believing the same visualization will work across different datasets
" Assuming that all the data is not relevant and some should be excluded

Insights:
" Having a mindset to shoot the messenger who delivers unanticipated insights
" Being afraid to share BI insights with customers and suppliers; this comment was followed by a tweet that “sharing the insights is a good way to cement ties in the value chain and it’s good business”
" Internal or external billing for every small change to a report, analysis, etc. – “it kills what analytics is about”
" Undertaking projects that depend on looking at the existing reports and recreating in BI with no change
Training:
" Knowing how important training is but still running out of funding for it
" Believing a sales rep who says you don’t need much training – “remember, they make more from license sales”

Implementation/outset:
" Implementing BI technology without use cases
" Being unwilling to disrupt existing processes to gain the BI success
" Not resolving misalignment between IT and business users – “this results in fighting over scheduling priorities and diminished resources”
" Asking questions primarily in retrospect – “it’s much easier if questions come first”
" Not owning the biz problem – “an example: it’s in the data warehouse, so it’s not my job”
" Focusing solutions exclusively upon executives; but a tribe member tweeted that we can attribute this to a sales tactic in earlier days when it was the only way vendors could sell outside of IT since the executive team had the money to buy

Those are the frontrunners among the culprits that erode the achievable value in BI initiatives.

One of the #BIWisdom participants pointed out that many of these issues have the same root cause: lack of trust – either trusting the business users, IT or the BI “experts.” A lack of understanding about technology can breed distrust. And good communications between all involved can reduce misunderstanding up front.

The area of training I agree – recurrent training is essential for success. One of the participants tweeted that schools have finally caught on and are teaching for data enthusiasts. As she observed, these days, “everybody is a data generator and consumer. Computing and analysis are no longer synonymous with IT; they are a common way of life with everyone.” Millennials are changing the way we consume and report data, so a generational change is starting to make a difference regarding the importance of training.

Bottom line: It’s that time of year when the Internet is flooded with articles and blog posts of predictions for the upcoming year. As I often tell journalists and inquirers, I don’t have a crystal ball and don’t make predictions. But I’ll make an exception now – I predict that we’ll see even more success in BI initiatives in 2015 if organizations eliminate these “gotchas” from their practice.

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

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Have you Opened Your Business Intelligence Treasure Chest?

November 2, 2014

It happened so fast …. With one foot in the trap, it looked like he had utterly failed in his mission. … It all started nineteen years earlier when ….

Everyone likes a good story. Especially marketing teams in today’s leading businesses. They know that effective storytelling enhances brand and knocks down barriers to sales.

Similarly, it’s becoming a powerful way to distribute data and information in business intelligence initiatives. Several business intelligence vendors even promote storytelling as a needed component of data discovery.
So, with the participants in one of my recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats, we explored what’s happening today with BI storytelling. I started the discussion by stating that I think it’s about applying context to BI-derived content and that I see storytelling as an integral part of a broader collaborative capability.
Several agreed that storytelling is “sharing” and thus part of collaboration to bring people “through a data-driven journey” or bring the “results of statistical analysis into others’ workflows.”

Therefore, others added, collaborative features should be an integral (and easy to use) part of BI tools. But someone pointed out most BI tools today focus on the quantitative and technical areas, not experiential areas.

The discussion turned direction when a participant tweeted that storytelling is independent of any BI technology. “It’s a craft or an art, which is poorly understood and needs formal constructs,” he said. “That’s what bugs me,” someone else tweeted. “Vendors may add features to aid in storytelling, but it still needs the craft, the art of storytelling.”

One suggestion was that it might help if companies create a data template based on a narrative structure and enhancement of interactivity to enforce the story understanding. But someone countered that with an opinion that storytelling is both graphic and narrative but not necessarily interactive.

So what does the BI storytelling craft encompass? The #BIWisdom tribe’s opinions were that it must include all or most of these elements:

• Be a highly condensed story with a beginning, middle and end that is relevant to the listeners
• Have a hero — someone who accomplished something notable or noteworthy
• Incorporate a surprising element, something that shocks the listeners out of complacency and shakes up their model of reality
• Stimulate an “of course” reaction and the listener should see the obvious path to the future; get the listener “from there to here” while believing they found their own way
• Embody the desired change process
• Inform and also motivate the listener to take action or want to know more
• Create a personal connection between the listener and the message in order to change the listeners’ opinion or inspire them to undertake difficult goals to improve things

That’s a tall order.

“Should storytelling be one of the main skills of a data scientist?” asked a tribe member.
Another stated it requires good analytical skills with a good balance with visual and narrative storytelling capabilities.

Is this combination of skills available broadly? Is storytelling an innate talent, or can people be trained to become great storytellers? Can technology make a BI business user a skilled storyteller?

What do you think?

Bottom line: Just as collaborative tools don’t make organizations collaborative, data storytelling tools don’t make users good storytellers. Does that mean that data storytelling in BI tools is a red herring? I don’t think so. I believe it’s a necessary — albeit today immature — feature set that will evolve to become more effective. And people can improve their storytelling skills with training.

Storytelling is like the surprise in a treasure chest — the key to buried riches in business intelligence outcomes. If your organization hasn’t opened this treasure chest yet, don’t continue to overlook it.
The bottom line, though, is the aftermath — what happens after the data is initially presented. The carefully crafted story will not only be insightful but will also cause a reaction that leads the listeners to take action. And therein lies your buried treasure or ROI.

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

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Dresner's Point: Organizations Need to Eliminate Data Sheep in BI

Perhaps a tag with “some assembly required” should be attached to business intelligence analytics tools.

We just released in July our Advanced and Predictive Analytics Market Study report in our Wisdom of Crowds series, and I wanted to explore the topic in more depth in one of my recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats. Our market survey found that awareness of the importance of BI analytics is high (90 percent), but adoption of analytics tools is in the early stages of deployment even though many of the tools have been available for decades.

I asked the tweetchat tribe about the current challenges that BI analytics face (from the users’ point of view) and, as usual, they tweeted a variety of opinions.

Several agreed that the biggest challenge is there are too many solutions and thus a lot of hype, which leads to confusion. Someone else commented that it’s not there are too many tools but rather that organizations haven’t found the right ones for their industry or segment specificity.

A dominant viewpoint among the group held that a lot of the analytics tools don’t scale or perform the way they were “told and sold,” especially when it comes to accessing multiple data sources. That comment generated a resounding thumbs-up response from several in the group. One person asked how it’s possible to “see through the PR fluff to the truth.”

Cost factors into the challenges too. Several agreed that user-based, per-seat license costs are too high. Another tweeted that license is never the biggest cost but is the first one looked at and often a driver. For that reason, vendors often discount license fees. But they rarely discount services such as implementation, maintenance and support, which are also significant.

The challenge that rose to prominence in our tweetchat is the lack of training and support for analytics tools. As the #BIWisdom tribe observed:
" A big challenge is data literacy. Users can see their stats but might not know what they mean.
" Companies are scrambling for analytics talent, and software companies are touting “everyone an analyst.” But not everyone is a data analyst. However, most users need to know how to adjust two or three key variables for better output. Data fluency among users is needed. Not everyone needs to be fluent in “talking” directly to the data, but every user needs a basic understanding. So a stratified approach is needed.
" Breeding a lifetime of data analysis starts with good training and support.

Most of the group agreed that education is playing a huge part in converting traditional data users to BI, but they dismissed the notion that it’s happening quick enough for the shift to analytics and predictive analytics.

And everyone agreed that all business people need education on critical thinking to become analytically driven. One of the tribe summed up the discussion: users lacking the ability to think critically are a big BI challenge for organizations today.

Bottom line: Organizations need to avoid what I call “data sheep” – creatures with a total reliance on software tools to present analysis and data. People still need to think. Knowledge of how to create a BI plot, for instance, and which type to use, is appropriate even if a tool automates it.

Sheep need the guidance of shepherds. Training in the principles of data analysis is necessary for BI analytics success, regardless of the tool. Also, even if a tool is ideal for an organization, the company culture will likely need to adapt, which requires education.

My opinion – and not stated sheepishly – is that all obstacles that stand in the way of business insights and users need to be minimized. The best way to achieve that is through training and support.

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Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC,  an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner's Point: Mobile BI on the Move

“If I’m at Starbucks doing business intelligence via WiFi with my laptop, is that Mobile BI? If so, if I do the same thing at work, what is that?” That question started the discussion at one of my recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats.

When the tweetchat tribe tried to level set what this booming area of business intelligence really is, we found some differing opinions.

Mobile BI supports the transient workforce, someone tweeted. No, it’s mobile because it uses mobile devices and the device facets (GPS, camera), most agreed. Example: a static BI report delivered to an iPad is Mobile BI. But another member tweeted that the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 blurs the lines, so we can’t define Mobile BI by devices; it’s just any portable workflow.

My opinion? Mobile BI allows taking fact-based insights/information on a mobile device with you to a decision point.

Our annual Wisdom of Crowds Mobile Computing / Mobile Business Intelligence Market Studies reveal a multi-year trend of growing interest in Mobile BI as well as growing sophistication on the part of users.
Almost a year ago at another of my #BIWisdom tweetchats, I asked participants for examples of where they saw Mobile BI in use. Two folks observed that they saw Mobile BI only in discrete pockets and use cases. Having said that, one added that some of the use cases were strategically critical.

The group in my recent #BIWisdom tweetchat reported they see people interacting with Mobile BI at airports, on the bus, in stores, at a supply chain distribution center, while waiting on elevators in an office building in New York City or getting real-time data on the trade floor. One of the #BIWisdom group said his client can track 30 percent of sales directly to the use of Mobile BI for sales productivity.
Someone commented that being able to take BI everywhere and have continuous accessibility makes up for the slower data speeds on a mobile device. But another wisely tweeted, “Other than the fact that I can do BI most anywhere, what does Mobile BI bring that traditional BI can’t?” One of the group said it’s the ability to interact directly with surroundings. He shared an example: GPS to filter location, then taking a picture of a store shelf for collaboration.

However, someone else questioned whether that means that collaboration must be a part of mobile BI for it to be successful. The group pondered whether mobile BI means moving from “just reporting” to “true insight” that is based on a collaborative event but decided that there are definite use cases where mobile BI adds value without collaboration.

Bottom line: In late 2013, the cost of deploying mobile hardware was prohibitive to many companies. Security was also a concern, according to our Wisdom of Crowds market study. At that time many of our survey participants stated they wanted to use Mobile BI only to view (and select and filter) information, not interact with it.

Today security is still the top obstacle to greater use of Mobile BI. Regional regulatory issues (especially in government, healthcare and banking), are also prominent concerns for Mobile BI. Even so, Mobile BI is moving up in critical priority. It’s also morphing significantly with new-generation IT infrastructure. Undoubtedly there will be security breaches – some big. That’s why it’s critical that organizations put security policy/programs in place.

Our Wisdom of Crowds market studies reveal that mobile is about new use cases and new UXs; it’s not about porting desktop BI to an external device. Most existing BI is too data dense to fit on a mobile device, so a lot of design rethinking is required. But I believe that the maturity of uses cases and benefits are more important for growing success than the maturity of Mobile BI technology.

Mobile BI is definitely on the move in user penetration and in vendor support. Already it’s no longer a market per se; it’s a feature.

Here’s what I’m watching for:

" I expect we’ll see an intersection of Mobile BI, Cloud BI, and Collaborative BI.
" All needed business intelligence features will be available on mobile devices.
" Eventually “Mobile BI” will become just “mobile” and “mobile” will just become apps in the same way that “Big Data” will eventually just become “data.”

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner's Point: Can You Have Self-Service BI and Governance Too?

I know what you’re probably thinking after reading the title of this blog post: the two are obviously a clash of interests, successful BI requires governance, there’s no middle-of-the road approach and one side will have to sacrifice its interests. You’re probably also thinking it poses a serious management challenge.
The dilemma requires some business intelligence wisdom, so I tossed the question out to the BI users, vendors and consultants in one of my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats after a participant tweeted that he had observed a “quantum shift” to self-service in BI delivery this year.

I asked, “Self-service is important, but what about governance? Can you do both well?”

Their opinions:
- “Yes, you can, but it’s definitely a challenge. And self-service requires even stronger governance.”
- “You have to focus on value creation and shape governance to not get in the way of agility.”
- “Governance involves multiple parallel processes; and the processes need to support, not hinder, the business.”

Those processes and roles of governance include standards, policies and procedures for steering, organizing, implementing and executing BI initiatives. And it involves validating the data and ensuring data security – or as one of the tribe tweeted, “processes to stop people from doing the bad things they are tempted to do with data.”

One of the group commented that it’s important to have tools that “liberate data (for the right reasons); but there are too many tools that, at the same time, also expose the data to abuse.” Another person agreed, tweeting that departmental data discovery tools enable line-of-business user insight, but some centralized control needs to be maintained.

The group agreed that the major part of governance is security control. But they debated what should be controlled. Is it just a matter of who can see what, when, and having the proper security profiles to control that issue? Is it a matter of keeping data locked down until it’s requested and the user and data are vetted? Someone tweeted that this doesn’t seem to align with the intent of self-service BI functionality.
Another tweeted that It’s important to have democratized access to the data and not have it locked up in silos but freely available to the lines of business that need it. And someone responded that there’s nothing wrong with centrally controlling data to ensure proper usage. But another participant commented that there is currently no easy way to transform and load small amounts of data into self-service tools.

The tweets about the role of governance regarding security ignited an important question, especially when considered in the realm of self-service BI: Does governance also cover data quality? After all, bad data leads to bad decisions. The #BIWisdom tribe concluded that data quality will always be an issue in BI, and good MDM practices can mitigate the issue. Several tweeted opinions that it’s important to expose bad data. And one of the tribe pointed out that there is “no such thing as bad data; there is only bad information. The same data can be turned into useful information in a different use case.”

They concluded in agreement that the the central problem of governance is ownership of the data and the BI initiatives. And most companies don’t have a formal way of approaching this. Therein lies the crux of the matter. Where there is no ownership, there is no accountability.

Bottom line: From my years of studying successes and failures in business intelligence governance, I recommend that organizations first evaluate how their various stakeholders might use, and could benefit from, the information the data yields. Leadership need to consider risks and vulnerabilities along with advantages and then develop a comprehensive approach to governance – including self-service functionalities. It’s also important to keep in mind that, even in a self-service mode, the information/insights may be applicable and cross over to multiple areas of the organization.

As I’ve seen time and again, the best way to take this comprehensive approach is to establish a BI Competency Center (BICC). The top activities for a BICC, according to respondents in our annual Wisdom of Crowds Market Studies are analytical model development, database design/management and project management. I believe that user education also should be a primary objective for a BICC.
So, yes, you can do self-service and governance well. If the BICC (or other non-siloed governance mechanisms) is effective and relevant to the enterprise business, self-service BI functionalities won’t be a vulnerability.

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Don’t Overlook the Zigzagging of Collaboration & Text Analytics

Missed the boat. Didn’t gather enough steam. All that glitters isn’t gold. These pronouncements are often the verdict when technology evolves quickly and some functionalities or features don’t grab a strong enough hold quickly enough in the market. But applying that verdict to collaboration BI as well as social media and text analytics would be a mistake, even though they haven’t met expectations.

Collaboration BI

At one of my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats this month, collaboration, social media and text analytics turned up in a discussion about 2013 BI predictions that didn’t pan out. The tweets started with one of the tribe commenting that “every year we hear collaboration BI will take off — but has it?”

I commented to the group that our annual Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study revealed in 2013 that collaboration in BI is hotter than ever, but it declined somewhat in favor of email as the preferred collaboration tool.

That was quickly followed up with a participant’s tweet that she saw two new BI products this month that offer collaboration as their core feature.

Then came a bunch of opinions from the group on why collaborative BI is difficult to adopt. Here’s their collective viewpoint:

• “Collaboration must have a foundation in the business; it’s not something that can be pushed from a BI tool.”
• “Collaboration is a business issue, not a BI issue. Technology is a facilitator, not the solution.”
• “True BI equals transparency. It tends to let the skeletons out of the closet.”
• “Many adoption issues are related a cultural shift. The technology highlights how poor change management is in many organizations. Prior to implementing the collaboration technology, the lack of change management was hidden below the surface.”

I agree! In fact I wrote a book about the Achilles heel in BI performance: success requires change management, not just technology.

Text analytics and social media

These two aspects of BI products have bagged some successes, yet our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study indicated a failing interest in both social media and text analytics. I asked the #BIWisdom tribe of buyers, vendors and consultants for their opinions on the factors behind this finding.

Here’s their real-world wisdom:

The value

• “Analysts have said there is more to be gained in ‘dark data’ around the enterprise than in social media data/sentiment.”
• “But what analysts say and what business wants sometimes differs. It’s a question of perspectives and relative value.”

The technology

• “I’m not sure the state-of-the-art technology is good enough yet.”
• “Text analysis and social media require extra effort, which increases the time to value. Vendors need to automate and decrease that effort.”
• “I tested a social analytics tool; I was less than impressed. It was keyboard based and turned up a lot of false positives.”
• “This needs more machine learning algorithms than most tools use today. Social analytics that lack natural language and sentiment analysis are of very limited value. Keywords won’t cut it.”
• “In text analytics the ability to combine analysis of text + numbers is key.”
• “Point-in-time relevance is an important component of using text and social media data. The data gets stale too quickly. Need speed.”

The demand

• “We keep hearing from clients that they want it!”
• “Companies want it but aren’t really sure what they need. I think it will be like CRM in the 1990s, a distracting shiny object until it’s better understood.”
• “It’s not like ERP data analysis, but we find the interest is still there. The question is how to do it well.”

Bottom line: What can we conclude from the fact that adoption of BI collaboration, social media and text analytics fell short of expectations in 2013? Don’t count them out of the picture. Although their journey to greater adoption zigzagged over the past year, customers want these functionalities to help create greater value as they build on their prior business intelligence successes. In fact, text analytics had a strong showing in the #BIWisdom group’s plans and aspirations for 2014. These three functionalities in BI technology are not yet in the ninth inning. Look for an upswing in adoption.

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

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Dresner’s Point: Ready for the “2014ization” of Business Intelligence?

I don’t like making predictions, so rest assured this is not another of a myriad of predictions articles that hit the media annually. Instead, let’s kick start the year with some definite plans and aspirations of companies in the business intelligence sphere. A great place for an insightful, real-world view of BI trends is my weekly #BIWisdom tweetchats with BI customers, vendors and consultants.

What is your organization planning to try to achieve in 2014? When I recently asked the #BIWisdom tribe this question, their tweets made it immediately clear that their companies are gearing up for achieving even greater value from business intelligence than they have to date.

Plans Include:

• More mobile BI
• More BI demos with real-life applications
• Get more into mobile BI as it helps to reach the masses and get closer to “Information Democracy”
• Explore the sharing potential of BI and the power to integrate additional sources at any point in the BI stack
• BI methodology is big on our checklist for this year
• Get up to speed with some of the specialized tools in the BI stack; it’s hard to keep up with the toolsets released so far for data integration, data quality, data management and data security
• Migrating to current versions of BI software; for innovations in BI software you need the newest versions. Examples: user empowerment and the speed of getting answers (not just reports)
• There is a growing interest in data that tells stories; keep up with advances in storyboarding to package visual analytics that might fill some gaps in communication and collaboration
• Monitor rumblings about trend to shift data to secure storage outside the U.S. due to the NSA revelations
• Expand basic BI to more users (not just multi-page dashboards, but targeted BI); mobile BI will certainly drive the expansion
• Have BI super-users engage with others to expand the penetration of BI among users
• Increase use of self-service products to provide more value and increase adoption of BI tools

Aspirations:

• More predictive analytics to learn more about Big Data
• Expand more into embedded BI
• Do more with text analytics; there’s a lot to mine from text analysis

Location intelligence:

The group also tweeted about a new thrust in business intelligence functionality — location intelligence or location analytics. Will it have legs in 2014, I asked? Definitely, they responded.
One person tweeted: “I’m close to this topic and see activity and a lot of interest growing in this area.”
Another tweeted, “Through the use of location analytics organization can see new patterns in their data that graphs and charts don’t reveal.”

Mobile and location are intertwined — two sides of the same coin — so it should have legs this year. Here at Dresner Advisory Services we’ll publish a report on our first Wisdom of Crowds® Market Study on Location Intelligence in February 2014.

Bottom line:

The #BIWisdom tribe’s tweets aren’t mere hopes. These folks are not punching above their weight. They have experienced success with BI so far and are building on that success to mine for greater value.

Judging by their comments, we have new BI trends to monitor as we watch the “2014ization” of BI unfold. Which trends will rise to prominence?

I’d love to know what plans and aspirations your company has for 2014. Please post your comment.

Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® Mobile Computing & Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Why do Some BI Sprouts Lead to Failure?

Over the years of conducting our Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study on various aspects of BI the percentage of respondents that report success with their BI initiatives increases each time. Yet there are still some that report failures.

Success begets even more success, of course. What enables an outcome of “mission accomplished” and what causes failures? This has been a topic of debates several times in our Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats.
Our market studies consistently reveal that key contributors to success are management commitment, organizational stability, focused implementation and requisite skills. So it follows that the opposite characteristics would lead to failure: lack of management commitment, unstable organization and lack of skills.

But my #BIWisdom tweetchat participants have expanded that picture with their real-world experiences as users, vendors and consultants. In our debates, they swept past the key characteristics and honed in on a central issue — How do organizations decide that a BI implementation failed?

Is the deciding factor that the company does poorly, or that the users are dissatisfied, or is it a combination of both factors? And what constitutes a “user” in this aspect; is it only users with decision authority? Is the deciding factor among end users the fact that vendors say the technology answers problems all on its own and thus there is not enough emphasis on process, training, briefings, change management? Is it the lack of a long-term vision and commitment, which then causes the BI solution to go stale and subsequently be perceived as a failure?

Failure is a relevant term; in some organizations the IT department may say the BI initiative is a success but end users say it’s a failure because they can’t use the tool.

A participant tweeted that evaluating whether or not a BI implementation fails should be like a doctor’s evaluation, checking for various symptoms to determine whether the implementation is “healthy.” From their own experiences, the #BIWisdom participants came up with a list of “symptoms” criteria for evaluating success or failure.

Someone tweeted that user adoption is the only symptom that counts. Someone else stated that it isn’t the only criterion, but it’s the most important one. Another participant disagreed, saying that it’s important that the users adopt a tool that delivers correct data and information.

Another tweeted that early adoption is critical. And someone else countered that an influential stakeholder’s adoption is the most critical factor, adding that “one negative C-level opinion is all it takes for failure.” One person stated that success requires “adoption from the C-suite to the shop floor.”

Several #BIWisdom folks pointed out that each department head in an organization might have different success criteria —ease of use, governance, integration, for example. And several opined that revenue and growth are the most important success criteria.

Another tweeted opinion is that success with BI analytics tools requires corresponding transformation of business processes.

And there was this bit of tweeted wisdom: “Failure is any BI deliverable that doesn’t result in a changed process or decisions. Otherwise, what was the point of the initiative?”

So the discussion shifted to context and actionability as well as measurement of success.
“But how can you measure ‘understanding?’” asked one of the group. “And what if you can’t prove you improved?” Another participant added that some business processes don’t lend themselves to measurement. So it’s “a bit like a scientist’s problem of mere observation impacting results of an experiment,” he added.
I think this tweet sums up the final opinions of the group: “It’s fair to say that evaluation of success or failure is a measurement of whether the BI initiative enabled change. After all, if it just proves your organization is perfect, the expense of evaluating the outcome isn’t justified.”

Bottom line: Of course failures also are learning experiences. But my experience and observation is that in successful organizations business intelligence is how people stay aligned with the mission and strategy.
Therefore, if BI is that crucial to an organization’s success, it begs the question: Does the BI industry do enough to ensure initial customer success with BI tools and solutions?

>> Click here to view our full catalog of Business Intelligence research products <<

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Does BI Need a Seducing Effect?

I guess Black Friday, January sales and constant reminders of how many shopping days are left before Christmas weren’t enough enough to entice shoppers to hit the stores early and often enough in the holiday season. Now we even have Pre-Black Friday and Green Monday. These seductive tactics to entice people with something “special” reminded me of a discussion we had at one my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats.

When I asked my Twitter group of BI enthusiasts what would help to rein in more users, it was apparent that they thought more self-service functionality is needed in BI apps. They agreed that vendors have made great strides in self-service BI (SSBI) but also agreed that vendors need to extend SSBI to advanced analytics.
The weekly #BIWisdom tweetchat is my favorite forum for BI discussions because it brings out varying perspectives among users, vendors and consultants and thus usually bubbles up effective real-world ideas. In the following tweets you can see how they painted decision making for improving the SSBI environment:
Should we “dummy down” advanced analytics for end users?

• No matter how good the information is, if a tool is too complex for end users, they won’t use it. They’ll take the path of least resistance. The more BI practitioners hide the complexity, the more users will think it’s easy.
• Complexity can be hidden behind well-designed semantic layers.
• Users want things simple and want what they’re accustomed to daily: Twitter, Google, Apple. And Twitter encourages over-simplification.

Should we train and educate the users better?

• Some tools require near-zero training to use. Pain comes from not understanding the data.
• Assuring data understanding is tough. Even with better visualization, it’s still a difficult problem to solve.
• I just saw a 3D map that could be rotated in a BI app. But does anyone really need that?
• Should it be a zero training approach or contextual help?
• Training in the abstract is tough, but training with live data is close to zero.
• Users have varying needs. They will care about data and information if it’s relevant to their roles. Training is easier if it’s personalized to their role.

Two of the group tweeted a viewpoint that buttonholed the real issue — “It’s funny how BI is becoming part of consumer apps and the app world is showing the IT world that the focus needs to be on UX / IX design; yet BI vendors struggle with adoption.”

The #BIWisdom group agreed this is a critical distinction, especially since a large part of the population is being raised, or switching to, a ‘mobile-first’ approach. The remaining discussion centered on the vendors’ responsibility for SSBI and BI adoption. As you can see, their opinions varied:

• Tools need to be simple and fast, but it’s not all the responsibility of the vendors.
• BI users aren’t always the right people to ask about UX design. Take me, for example: Give me a big table of numbers, and I’m set.
• Letting analysts design the UI results in a poor design.
• A BICC (BI Center of Competency) should include an expert in UX / UI design.

As the tweetchat wound down, they agreed on two aspects.

First, vendors that don’t focus on UX / IX design and self-service functionality risk becoming irrelevant. “That’s the price of entry,” someone commented. Most agreed that vendors aren’t focusing on design and SSBI in their sales pitch.

Second, you can have the best data or information in the world, but “pretty” matters because pretty and easy beat complete and complicated every day of the week. “Develop an ugly dashboard and see what happens to usage,” tweeted one participant. Someone else added, “Even the placement and color of KPIs impacts usability.”

Bottom line: I recognize the validity of all their comments. But I also recognize that problems are often perception more than reality. I believe the issue around self-service BI is an education issue first and a technology issue second.

I believe organizations need more education (and change management), especially focusing on meaningful BI experiences. And I like the community-based approach to developing solutions and UX / IX design; this can make for more durable and more value-producing software. What could be more seductive than higher value and return on investment?


Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® Mobile Computing & Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: How to Move the Needle in User Adoption

The topic of how to increase user adoption of business intelligence technologies generated a lot of opinions in a recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchat.

The tweets started with opinions about what hampers user adoption. Some tweeted that the tangling of BI into the Big Data space causes confusion, it’s a mistake to try to get end users to adopt “analyst tools” and we must stop force-feeding generic analysis tools to end users even if they are “simple” to use. Someone tweeted that some organizations make the mistake of working only with power users who may have a vested interest in not expanding adoption to others. Many agreed that trying to change a user’s adoption of and interaction with BI tools on a daily basis is difficult; one tweet compared it to trying to change someone’s religion or belief system.

The conversation turned when a #BIWisdom tribe member stated that “BI encompasses people, process and technology; but most implementations focus on the technology and forget the people and process.” Others then chimed in with:

• BI should just be intuitive and just a part of other apps; users don’t want to think about doing BI
• Predictive analytics adds a lot of value; but it needs to be a part of users’ current desktop app, not a separate app
• Analytics should be placed inside business processes and link to actions rather than making users go to another system
• BI solutions should not be approached from a one-size-fits-all mindset

A participant tweeted that “Vendors need to push toward true self-service functionalities and super-easy user interfaces; self-service lies not in making generic tools simpler to use but in custom interfaces for specific tasks.” This tweet sparked comments comparing BI apps to mobile apps, as apps on smart phones and apps are very task oriented, enticing and focus on the end user. Mobile apps have the characteristics that “good BI” should have: agile, visual, interactive and intuitive. Unfortunately this seldom occurs.
Some tweeted that perhaps we should apply the mobile app model to business intelligence. Another participant added that “Every hour of training needed for BI technology cuts user adoption by at least 50 percent — compare that to the quick adoption of iPads and other tablets, which need no manual or training course.”

In the end, the group concluded that there is not enough focus on incentives. They agreed that bad analysis often goes unpunished and good analysis often goes unrewarded. “People who use BI technology well should be made into organizational heroes in internal communications and should be rewarded,” tweeted a tribe member. Organizations should praise people who demonstrate transparency and accountability as both are essential in an effective BI environment.

Along that line, someone added that organizations should also “identify employees who are against the necessary change management necessary to build a corporate culture that embraces fact-based analysis and accountability and then communicate to them the value/benefits of leveraging BI. That aligns with my own observation over the years that, without top-down strategic change management, an organization will not widely adopt BI.

Bottom line: A lot has changed, and the way we use technology today is vastly different from 20 years ago or even a decade ago. But one thing has not changed: technology adoption must be driven top down. If the CEO and other CxOs don’t believe in the technology, nobody else will either. My observance is that CxOs must embrace the technology; when they believe it is critical to their personal success, everyone else will get on board too. As soon as there is a hint that maybe the technology is not strategically important, people will treat it with denial and neglect.

There are some things that can be done to “move the needle” in BI user adoption, but nothing is as impactful as getting the CEO on board.


Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® Mobile Computing & Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Collaborative Technology Won’t Make You Collaborative

At one of our recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats, we talked about the findings in our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Collaborative Business Intelligence Market Study, which led to an insightful conversation about why some organizations haven’t adopted collaborative BI technologies and why some adopted it but failed to achieve the anticipated value.

 We started with the group coming to an agreement as to what collaborative BI is. I tweeted that, at a minimum, it’s the ability to annotate, share and co-author in the context of the BI solution.

 Others tweeted that it:

 • Requires that people interact with other users, not just with visuals and data

• Is good for driving toward consensus and documenting the process

• Is important for distributed organizations where it’s difficult to have face-to-face meetings

 • Enables collaborating with people one has never met

• Is good for addressing information that doesn’t lend itself to being captured nonverbally

 We agreed that collaborative BI is a good mechanism for sharing explicit knowledge but face-to-face meetings are still the best way to share implicit knowledge. Facial expressions are an extremely important part of the context in sharing implicit knowledge.

 If it’s so effective, why aren’t organizations jumping on the collaborative BI bandwagon and why have some not seen the anticipated ROI?

The #BIWisdom tribe had several observations:

 • Some companies are not progressing fast enough on a BI maturity model.

 • The technology is in an early stage and perhaps is not good enough yet to gain acceptance with an audience broader than early adopters.

 • Mobile BI has so many collaborative features that people don’t realize collaborative BI technologies are different from mobile BI.

 • It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg phenomenon: Some organizations may have the right technology but lack a collaborative culture, yet others may have a collaborative culture but may not have implemented the right technology.

 But what resonated most strongly with the tribe was the conclusion that adoption of collaborative BI technologies is a generational issue. Organizations that have a younger board tend to have younger collaborative business processes across the organization. Where top leadership is older, the organization often lacks top-down encouragement for a collaborative culture and incorporating feedback into the way it operates.

 Short of the threat of ouster, embracing collaborative tech tools requires strong change management to build a culture change that understands the value added proposition leveraging collaboration. The group provided two examples of rigid organizational changes to implement a collaborative culture.

 The first example was a failure. A large multinational telecommunication company undertook a strategy to change its culture. After 10 years the change has not been accomplished. The big learning is that the strategy was flawed from the beginning because they failed to identify all the actors and their differing stances.

 The second example was an organization with 5,000 employees; five percent of them were involved in the change. This successful BI initiative was built on Yammer. The main ingredient it required was curiosity and a desire to improve. It took six months to really gear up, and it reached critical mass when everyone realized that they were solving problems collaboratively that they could not have solved in isolation.

 Bottom line: Our Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats are actually a good example of collaboration. Participants (BI users, vendors and consultants) are remote, collaborate with no boundaries and leverage a chance to think “big picture.” Too often organizations throw technology at an underlying cultural issue. But collaborative BI technology is only an enabler for a culture that is already collaborative. The deployment of any business strategy needs to include a solid change management process, plan, strategy and enforcement/modeling from top management; this is especially true with collaborative BI. Collaborative technology will not make an organization collaborative.

2013 Wisdom of Crowds Collaborative Business Intelligence Market Study with Buyers’ Guide

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Mobile Business Intelligence - What are your views?

What are your views on Mobile Business Intelligence?

Data collection has begun for our 5th annual Wisdom of Crowds® Mobile Business Intelligence Market Study and we'd really value your input!

Click here to be directed to the survey!

Here are a few important reasons to participate:

1) Your participation supports a modern and wholly objective approach to industry research AND participants will receive a complimentary research report.

2) You get to weigh in and rate your Mobile Business Intelligence software vendors.

3) This study is NOT sponsored by vendors or anyone else. It is intended to provide an objective view into the market and reflect the experience and opinions of Mobile and Location Business Intelligence users.

Also, your personal information is kept completely confidential! We NEVER share it with any other parties, for any reason!

Click here to be directed to the survey!

Thank you in advance!

Best,

Howard

Our Q3 Newsletter

Newsletter from Dresner Advisory Services

As we approach the final 3rd of 2013, we thought you might appreciate an update and progress report from Dresner Advisory Services.

It's been an especially busy year for us and we're pleased with what we've achieved and excited by what lies ahead.

Here are some highlights from this year:

Our Website: We've reorganized our website dresneradvisory.com and made it much more useful and accessible. On the home page you'll find our twitter feed, recent articles, latest blog entry and most recent research products.

We've also added a "complimentary research" section, with free articles covering essential topics related to Business Intelligence. Titles include: What Influences Value of Predictive Analytics?, Watch Out for the Credibility Gap in BI Data, Make Sure the Heat is on for Business Intelligence, Involve Customers and Suppliers in Your BI Chain and Are You Ready for the Mobile BI Diamond?

We encourage you to visit our website and welcome your feedback!

Research: We took on a pretty ambitious research agenda for 2013 and have succeeded in publishing a number of breakthrough market studies.

Our 4th annual flagship report - The Wisdom of Crowds ® Business Intelligence Market Study was expanded for 2013 and contains 124 pages of in-depth market analysis, with 80 charts and tables, 23 vendor rankings AND an exclusive 17-page buyers' guide! This buyers' guide compares and contrasts 22 BI vendor products across 19 key feature sets and 3 platforms: Traditional, Cloud and Mobile.

We published our 2nd annual Cloud Business Intelligence study in July with everything needed to assess this market phenomenon with 66 pages of in-depth market analysis, 50 charts and tables, 13 vendor rankings and a buyers' guide comparing and contrasting BI vendor cloud capabilities - including user BI features, cloud architectural support and cloud security.

And, we launched our inaugural Embedded BI study - focusing upon the requirement to make BI capabilities pervasive by including them as a part of other applications.  Like our other thematic research reports, Embedded BI explores user perceptions and intentions and includes vendor rankings and a buyers’ guide, making it a valuable tool for anyone considering investing in embedded BI products and services.

All of these premium research products can be found on our products page on dresneradvisory.com/products.

What's next: Moving forward, we are gearing up for our fall data collection project, which will support Mobile Computing, Mobile BI and (new this year) location analytics. We'll be sending out another email when data collection begins. As always, we welcome user participation in our studies and reward participation with a complimentary copy of the findings.

We'd also like to hear from you! If you have specific suggestions that you'd like to share, please respond to this email!

Hope the rest of 2013 is a successful one for you!

Best,

Howard

Chief Research Officer
Dresner Advisory Services

Dresner’s Point: Are You Ready for the Mobile BI Diamond?

A participant in one of my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats observed that “in the mobile ecosystem, Big Data + social + the NSA data surveillance news are a perfect storm.” Will the NSA storm change attitudes regarding mobile BI and thus hinder its growth? It’s a good question and it sparked an interesting discussion in our Twitter group.

Before the perfect storm, our tweetchat tribe (comprised of customers, vendors and consultants/analysts) were of the opinion that the growing “app” mentality for “cool stuff” among consumers and the easy-to-consume info in mobile apps could end up increasing trust and thus lead to less testing and faster releases.
But one of the tribe tweeted that, at a minimum, the NSA storm will draw more attention to the organizational risks inherent in BYOD models. However, another member pointed out that BYOD is already a big challenge in mobile BI adoption because it makes it difficult to keep standardize and optimize the mobile BI experience.

Someone tweeted that users in finance groups were already the least interested in mobile BI. They tend to be risk averse, and the NSA storm may cause the risks to seem even larger. But another participant tweeted that customer-facing business units are the biggest adopters, not the back-office finance groups. In fact the biggest drive for mobile BI is coming from the boardroom.
The #BIWisdom tribe concluded that the perfect storm won’t have much impact on the growth of mobile BI because “it’s absolutely essential that data be real time” and “in a data-driven culture, the information needs to follow people everywhere.”

Our group agreed that a lot of organizations are trying mobile BI, but achieving success is a slow process. Other organizations are reluctant to justify the investment without greater proof of success, and many of the benefits (such as more eyes on the information, ready access to information) are hard to quantify.

Challenges include:

• Connectivity issues that make live mobile BI undependable.
• Difficulty in authoring and using advanced analytics until the UI/UX fundamentally changes. It can’t just be a simple port of existing code to mobile; it requires rethinking.

An even bigger issue, tweeted a tribe member, is that by definition mobile BI informs one person at a time. “What happens after people are seamlessly informed individually?” he asked.

“They can still collaborate,” tweeted someone else. “What’s the difference if they collaborate on the road or in a cube?”

“Collaborate how?” he responded. “Collaboration requires some thoughtful engineering, which is currently lacking.”

“BI can’t be in its own dimension,” another tribe member tweeted. “Collaboration must be part of the workflow and process to decision making, and that workflow must be smooth and transparent. And not all users feel comfortable with collaboration features, so there’s a cultural shift that must take place.”

The #BIWisdom group concluded that, despite the NSA storm and the technical issues that still need to be addressed, mobile BI will grow.

Bottom line: Like an unpolished diamond in the rough, mobile delivery of business intelligence hasn’t yet reached its potential. But our annual Wisdom of Crowds® market studies show that mobile is increasingly becoming a force in BI. In fact, our recent report on the Wisdom of Crowds® Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study highlighted the fact that 70.4 percent of respondents ranked mobile BI as “critically important” in 2012.

Mobile BI is also a natural complement to cloud BI, which is definitely growing in importance. Our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® study also found that many small organizations are embracing mobile BI and cloud BI as a means of side-stepping traditional computing. The user data indicates strong synergy between cloud and mobile in BI.

The demand for business intelligence arises from multiple needs; some won’t suit mobile delivery, but some will. So mobile BI adoption will grow despite its current drawbacks.
Consequently, mobile BI will engage a whole new group of users — and they will need to be educated about the use of BI data.

Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2012 Wisdom of Crowds ® Mobile Computing/Mobile BI Market Study


Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Dresner’s Point: Involve Customers and Suppliers in Your BI Chain

August 15, 2013

Do you remember when you thought it was too risky to purchase something online? Remember when you held out for a while and didn’t immediately hop on board the bandwagon like others to enjoy the convenience of paying your bills via online banking? Or maybe you still haven’t taken those plunges. The same phenomenon is affecting some organizations’ entrée into cloud-delivered business intelligence. But others have injected a big dose of value creation into their BI activities by moving to the cloud.

In fact, one of the significant nuggets in our recent 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Cloud Business Intelligence Market Study is that organizations targeting external users (customers and suppliers) are the biggest users of cloud BI. It makes sense because of the cloud’s scalability and elasticity —and the ability to isolate those users from internal systems..

Integrating end-to-end value chains is definitely valuable, from the perspectives of data source as well as delivery. Without involving customers and suppliers in the BI chain, you don’t get full value. In addition, delivering BI in the cloud (private or public) allows organizations to spend their resources on innovation as opposed to operations. The cloud’s elasticity and pay-as-you-grow pricing model makes it easier to budget and allocate resources.

So why are some organizations opting for traditional BI instead of tapping into the value of BI through the cloud? I wanted to take a deeper look at this from the perspectives of the tribe at my Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats. Their positions and insights span the horizon of buyers, vendors, and analysts, and they’re on the cusp of what’s happening in the business intelligence space.

On a recent Friday we plunged into a discussion about the nuances of adding customers and suppliers to the BI value chain. The tribe members’ real-world observations align with our survey findings around the top barriers to adopting cloud BI — security issues and loss of control.

It all comes down to trust.

The tribe tweeted that one of the points of moving BI to the cloud is to give some control to users. But that power shift can be significant, and not fully understanding the risks causes some uneasiness. Tweets pointed out that:

• “Internal users having control is one things, but external users (customers and suppliers) affecting control could present risks.”
• “By giving these external partners more control of what data/information they see via the cloud, they may bring their own agendas into your BI.”

“Where do you draw the line?” they asked.

When it comes to the barrier of security, several participants tweeted that in reality data is no more secure these days inside the organization than it is in a public cloud (think NSA). Nevertheless, perception is as important as reality. Most of them agreed with me that inadequate security is an easy crutch to lean on when there are other hidden agendas for not moving to the cloud.

I asked the tribe what needs to happen for cloud BI to earn more trust to overcome the control and security barriers. Policy changes? Education? New technology?

• A member suggested that executives might gain more trust if the cost drops to the point where that trust is bought. Another said trust can’t be bought, especially since the days of Enron.
• Someone else tweeted that big brands like Amazon help overcome the trust issue and cloud providers are bending over backwards these days to show security and compliance.
• One was of the opinion that “Trust with the cloud is only as good as the gap between now and the next news story on compromised or lost data. Even if you lose cloud data because of internal mistakes, people will still remember that it was in the cloud when it happened.”

My view: Trust takes time. After all, some people still won’t pay their bills online.

Bottom line: For some organizations, bringing customers and suppliers into their BI corral is a good starting point for moving BI to the cloud. And delivering greater value through cloud BI can be the proving ground that leads to larger acceptance within the organization.

Because of the trust issue, most organizations will opt for private cloud BI before moving across to public clouds. Organizations that don’t want to fully move BI to the cloud right away will find the right mix of on-premises and cloud that works best for them.

The cloud will continue to disrupt the business intelligence space just as it has in all other aspects of technology. And whether or not there is a trust issue, cloud BI will catch on just as e-commerce did when people realized they liked the benefits of shopping online.

Click Here to Purchase Your Copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® CloudBI Market Study

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.

Discussion: 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study

Having just recently published our 2013 Wisdom of Crowds® Business Intelligence Market Study, the group attending one of my recent Friday #BIWisdom tweetchats on Twitter wanted more insights on several of the study’s findings.

Of particular note was the fact that user penetration of BI solutions remains modest again this year, with 36 percent of respondents reporting less than 10 percent of users with access to BI.

Why is user BI access so limited? Budget? Politics? User resistance to change? BI has traditionally been more targeted to executives than to operational levels? The organization is not agile enough to act on BI insights? The tweetchat attendees believe all of these reasons are behind the low numbers.

Members pinpointed another reason for low user penetration: IT departments have very different priorities than line-of-business users. It was evident by responses in our 2013 market study that the past 12 months have seen an increase in demand among users for self-serve, ad-hoc and real-time BI tools. However, despite good intentions, ease of use and speed of implementation are not top priorities for IT departments.

There is a definite need to bridge the gap (described as an “abyss” in one of the tweets) between IT priorities and business needs. That’s why I started talking about the need for organizations to create a Business Intelligence Center of Competency (BICC) back in 2000 and included it as a topic in this year’s market study. BICCs are an effective way of bridging the gap.

“Should BI reside in IT or in a line of business?” a #BIWisdom member asked. I believe it should be co-owned and should reside in both worlds.

I think that the Finance group is in a unique position to help drive business intelligence through an organization if they are willing to rise to that challenge. Finance has tentacles everywhere. And financial metrics are a great starting place, especially for a public company. But it’s only effective if they don’t stop at the Finance department. Organizations need to evolve their BI beyond Finance to an office of performance or a BICC.

Our 2013 market study found that in organizations where there was a BICC reporting in to Finance, they were much more likely to be successful. By virtue of the fact that they had a BICC, in my mind, it also meant that they were willing to take on a broader set of challenges.

Our #BIWisdom tweetchat ended with an important question: How can we get to a point where BI is so pervasive that it’s invisible operationally, where people won’t even know they are using BI because it’s just part of the normal process?

A member tweeted that good penetration requires a BI “evangelist” along with tools and communications about success.

Another member said she believes that BI must be a top-down initiative in order for that to happen. “The C-level executives must declare that it is a data-driven company,” she tweeted. “This declaration even needs to be part of the onboarding process, and employees need to see that a data-driven strategy is a winning strategy.”

Bottom line:

Improving today’s tepid BI user penetration requires the involvement of a CEO who is passionate about business intelligence. A company and its CEO are intertwined; in fact, in many cases the company is really an extension of the CEO. This is especially the case in smaller organizations. A CEO needs to understand where the market is going and make strategic and significant investments to move the company in that direction. Thus, the CEO is not only the number-one driver of business intelligence but also the number-one beneficiary.

Interestingly, our 2013 market study found overall that the executives across the board were not only the biggest drivers of business intelligence but were also the number-one target for business intelligence use. And that’s great because success requires a top-down approach. If BI initiatives deliver meaningful information on which executives can run their company, then BI will filter throughout the rest of the organization.

Click here to obtain your copy of the 2013 Wisdom of Crowds ® Business Intelligence Market Study – Buyers’ Guide Edition

Howard Dresner is president, founder and chief research officer at Dresner Advisory Services, LLC, an independent advisory firm. He is one of the foremost thought leaders in Business Intelligence and Performance Management, having coined the term “Business Intelligence” in 1989. He has published two books on the subject, The Performance Management Revolution — Business Results through Insight and Action, and Profiles in Performance — Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change. He hosts a weekly tweet chat (#BIWisdom) on Twitter each Friday. Prior to Dresner Advisory Services, Howard served as chief strategy officer at Hyperion Solutions and was a research fellow at Gartner, where he led its Business Intelligence research practice for 13 years.