Business intelligence implementation can turn tables around for your organization by providing actionable insights into data from every department. Nevertheless, despite all of its promises, enterprise BI and reporting implementations sometimes generate inconsistent outcomes (and even fail!). This may involve excruciating delays, significant budget overruns, data issues, and annoyed customers.
When BI strategies fail, the story often goes out something like this: The development team primarily meets with all stakeholders to gather business requirements. Then they go off to roll out all deliverables and accomplish goals. While this may sound like an ideal approach, it rarely succeeds for a variety of reasons:
Typically, delays occur because it takes longer for the various reporting departments to get an understanding of the business rules governing their required metrics.
You might not require the data sources or business rules you think you would.
Numerous problems with data validation could exist.
Reports' visual appearance or dashboards' functionality could be different from what you desired.
It's possible for requirements to be misunderstood and for deliverables to be unreliable.
Because everyone has different schedules, delays can occur.
Unfortunately, all of this results in unhappy stakeholders, mistrust among business users of the system, wastage of time, money, and resources, and a lack of progress toward the BI solution you initially required.
The most effective way to adopt BI at the enterprise level is in a phased manner. There are five things you should do to prevent any significant issues while BI implementation:
Gather data analysis & reporting requirements: It is highly imperative to involve all stakeholders from the executive team to your business users from the initial stage. Having all the necessary requirements in place from your team saves a lot of extra rework down the lane.
Define the requirements in terms of the key business sectors: It becomes easy to stay on point given that the task is divided into much more manageable areas. Employees involved in the project also feel more productive knowing that work is being completed. When you run into difficulties with larger BI implementation projects, the delivery date may be repeatedly postponed with nothing to show for all the effort that was expended. Project phase division enables a more iterative development approach in which communication with project stakeholders is regular and reliable. This keeps you motivated and encourages additional input that can direct and adjust your development trajectory.
Prioritize the phases: The dynamics and internal politics of your organization may significantly impact on how you schedule your phases. But consider the below-listed questions when figuring out the schedules and priorities:
Validate data: Data validation is another important aspect of enterprise BI that benefits from an iterative approach. The integrity of data is essential in the BI-dominated world. If your data turns out to be erroneous during the initial roll-out, you risk losing the end users' trust. Keeping an extra eye on the data gives the validation team more opportunities to spot errors and make the final validation/QA stage simpler.
Roll it out to all business departments: Rolling out the BI application to specific departments and/or business areas allows you to focus your resources little by little to ensure the rollout is seamless and successful rather than trying to force the entire organization to undergo a total paradigm change all at once. Other departments may get enthusiastic about their rollouts and more engaged when their turn comes if positive word of mouth about the successful BI implementation and tool utilization spreads.
Wrapping Up
On a concluding note, BI is a continuous process. As your business grows & evolves with time, you’ll need to upgrade your business intelligence system to meet those changes. And Polestar Solutions brings you an effective BI approach to help you accelerate your business growth.