Organizational Issue for BI Success: Critical Success Factors for BI Implementations Within the Enterprise

Introduction

New technologies always fascinate organization leadership. They want to quickly adopt them and repeat the much-hyped success their first mover peers have already achieved. But emulating similar success by using similar technologies is hard to come by because all organizations are different and their needs are different. The key is to identify those organizational factors that help or impede implementation of a new technology and then take appropriate action while planning, selection, implementation, exploitation and cessation of any technology, in our case Business Intelligence(BI), Data analytics(DA) and data mining (DM) technology.

This chapter will focus on transformative impact BI, DA and DM can bring to an organization decision making, enhancing its performance, reducing costs and improving competitive posture. We will be using Business Intelligence (BI) as a common word to depict all types of tools and technologies that are enabling organization use and exploit data to derive new meaning for enhancing their business performance and competitiveness. Since BI tools are usually self-service by users, proper selection of tool to meet various types of users within the organization is the key to success. This chapter enunciates key principles and practices which will help bridge organization requirements with what BI tool(s) offers. A framework of organizational factors such as user’s role, their analytical needs, access preferences and technical /analytical literacy will be considered for BI success. This chapter will also cover evaluation methodology to select best BI tools based on these organizational factors and needs. This chapter will help its readers to identify the right BI solution which is properly aligned to the organization infrastructure and is able to meet its analysis needs to achieve anticipated business value. This chapter will outline the softer issues that need to be addressed so that its full potential can be realized during implementation of BI, DA and DM technologies. It will also outline how to bring about change in organization culture to ensure a successful implementation of BI, DA and DM technologies.

To summarize the objectives of this chapter would be:

• •

  Examine the transformative impact of BI technologies.

• •

  Selection and alignment of BI technologies with the organization needs and its long-term vision.

• •

  Describe the framework for successful adoption of BI technologies for organizational success.

Background

BI is used to derive insights from vast amount of Data for better and faster decisions. For this it needs the following four:

• 1.

  Algorithms

• 2.

  Technology building blocks

• 3.

  IT infrastructure

• 4.

  Skills for

  • a.

    Business insight

  • b.

    Data Science

  • c.

    Information Technology

Analytics is no longer part of IT function and is being practiced currently by business users who want faster actions with better speed-to-insight response. Business function users can justify higher cost of IT and may like to go independently for quick results by acquiring tools and infrastructure against the wishes of their IT peers who try to trade off speed with lower cost by attempting to implement common platforms for BI. However, the later approach by IT would normally take time but would have better architecture. The former approach will yield quicker results but will lead to integration problems besides increased cost, duplicate investments and redundancy. The choice between these two is also about who takes decision for the technology, such as the choice of BI tools and IT Infrastructure. Such conflicts have been faced regularly by most organization and the successful group is the one who is able to get more support from top management in decision making. No wonder while cloud-as-a-analytics alternative is increasingly getting popular with business functional users who can pay as they use and have no dependency on IT control, it is not much welcomed by IT leaders of the organization.