With the best will in the world it is a sad fact that many BI projects fail. On the other hand most IT projects disappoint as they fail in at least one of three critical success factors
To be delivered on time, within budget and to specification.
The good news is that if you take care to avoid these five typical mistakes you greatly increase the likelihood of success:-
- Believing one-size fits-all.
- Giving users tools incompatible with their job
- Inadequate data governance
- Unclear roles & responsibilities
- Lack of training
One other mistake I typically see:-
Trying to bite off too much in one go.
An ISV that builds a complex analytics layer in its product that is late to market, too complex and irrelevant to user's priorities
An enterprise that does not ask the users across the organisation what would make the biggest difference to their working lives.
Data governance is key to balancing the business’s need for data access with IT’s need for appropriate data security. The key is finding the right balance. Some organizations keep all data under lock and key. This leads to frustrations at many levels, especially when users want to combine data sets to find new insights, or even just create some new charts from a single set of data. Other organizations have set up their data analytics in a way that completely ignores the need to control their data. Users can pull data from their cloud-based apps, Excel, and other sources. However, with all these various data sets floating around, they no longer have a single version of the truth. Fostering an environment that encourages self-service while also governing the access to data in a centralized manner is achievable. .
