With an ever changing technology landscape and the overflow of digital data, Business intelligence plays a critical role for companies to remain competitive in the market. The power to understand and analyze data to make quick, competitive and impactful decisions is the need of the hour for any decision maker. BI user adoption plays a critical role in the drive to become a data-driven company. Unfortunately, BI adoption rate for many companies hovers as low as 30% for the executed BI projects. This situation leads to massive loss of time, infrastructure and money spent on these BI projects. Below are a few approaches that help in improving the BI adoption rate in the company.
1) Strategize BI from Top:
Adopting a data-driven culture is a transformational initiative and cannot be started from the bottom rungs of decision making unit. The strategy has to flow from the top to bottom. The corporate objective has to be modularized and the departmental objectives have to be aligned to match to business objectives. Most of the BI projects fail during this phase as companies take the bottom-up approach and the compartmentalized BI implementation eventually does not align with the overall business needs of the organization. Start the business intelligence planning from the top and implement it progressively to the bottom of the decision table.
2) Implementing for business user:
Most BI projects in the market are implemented as packaged solutions with IT department functioning as gatekeepers to the BI reporting. Unfortunately, each business is unique and the business challenges are specific to the organization and there can be no one product fits all solution. Business Intelligence should not to be treated as a replacement to existing reporting environment; rather it should help business users to work smarter, move faster and make better decisions. It has to address to the specific challenges of the company and not just produce template market reports. Eliminating the mindset of treating BI as an IT function and enhancing the business user experience with self-service BI reporting goes a long way in improving the BI adoption rate in the company.
3) Bring BI to review meetings:
While BI is seen as an initiative to enhance the reporting environment and close the gap between data to decisions, it is still not universally accepted tool for review meetings. This situation is partly attributed to limited understanding of the BI audience in the company. While there are power-users in the organization preferring slice and dice of data for dynamic analysis, there are even more information-consumers who would be content with generating static reports for business metrics. Industry estimates a ratio of around 1:4 between dynamic and static reporting. Understanding and balancing the equation between these different types of users is a critical component in the success of BI adoption. Use of BI tool in review meetings helps in collective analysis and thus improving the adoption of BI culture in the company.
These are some of the many steps that can be taken to improve the BI user adoption in the company. The drive has to start with understanding the different stakeholders involved in the decision circle and addressing the specific challenges faced in making decisions.
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