Manage-Wise

BI: demonstrate small successes

When you have completed a successful project—however small you must start—you will earn the trust and support of whichever executive benefits from that first project. This executive will quickly become your BI champion and advocate for promoting BI to other departments, functions, business units (absent political power struggles and assuming they are strategically aligned).

As an example, ENECO Energie is one of the top three gas and electricity suppliers in the Netherlands. ENECO executives initially frowned upon BI. According to Ton van de Dungen, Manager, Business Intelligence Center of Excellence, the attitude was: “There is not one successful BI project. It’s too expensive.” So in 2003, with an entrepreneurial approach, ENECO’s initial BI project consisted of manual extracts from source systems and Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables. Accounts receivable was the only subject area with the goals of better understanding why receivables were high and identifying opportunities to reduce them. The pilot cost only 350,000 euros (EUR) and helped ENECO save 4 million EUR ($5 million). Following the pilot’s success, the BI team could get support and funding for a full BI architecture that included a data warehouse and suite of BI tools.

ENECO’s initiative demonstrates a key secret to success: successful BI companies start their BI initiative with or without executive sponsorship. They demonstrate success early and ramp up only once they have garnered that executive buy-in. Success at this early stage has to be measured in hard business benefits. ENECO could cite a specific value saved in millions of euros.

Use the measurable business benefits that leading companies describe throughout this book—improved patient care, faster synergies following a merger, increased customer satisfaction, immediate sales lift, cost reduction in advertising campaigns—to inspire conversation with your executives on how your company can exploit business intelligence.

Manage expectations

Managing expectations is paramount in earning and retaining executive support. Never over-promise and under-deliver. Particularly if you are starting out without executive support, position your efforts as only a prototype or point solution. Communicate clearly that the BI deployment will not be scaled up or out without an executive champion. This can be a difficult balancing act, particularly when vendors undermine your efforts. A BI project manager for a medical center expressed frustration:

All the BI vendors come in and show these executives a bunch of eye-candy and make it sound easy, when it’s not. So we had no funding, no resources for our project. The BI vendors set us up for failure. An executive will have a team of 10 analysts that he can ask a question of. The executive has no idea how their staff gets the numbers, the manual processes, the data manipulation. So the comparison is that it takes their staff an hour to give an answer versus a BI project that takes six months. Nobody has a handle on what it costs to do manually and how vulnerable they are.

Exploit frustration: If you currently lack executive level sponsorship, ask the sought-for sponsor: “How much time do you spend in meetings arguing about the numbers?” Find out the degree of pain and frustration.

At Corporate Express, executives throughout the company were increasingly frustrated at the multiple versions of the truth. People argued about the numbers, and nobody agreed on the reality. If an individual’s performance seemed weak, the numbers could always be blamed. “After we implemented MicroStrategy, we didn’t argue about the numbers, and there was just support for what is the performance and then identifying the business opportunities. If everyone comes to the table and knows the data is consistent, we can sooner address the pressing business issues,” explains Walter Scott, Vice-president of Marketing.

How you frame the frustration is important. Executives don’t want to hear about what a mess the data is or how tightly locked it is in the operational system. The focus has to be on the degree of frustration and that business intelligence—done well—can relieve that frustration and provide measurable business value. You have to be able to fill in the blank:

The frustration is killing us, and business intelligence can provide benefit. For example: “The time we spend debating numbers (frustration) is a problem, and business intelligence can provide a single set of numbers and allow us to focus more on innovation (benefits).” Or “We are losing market share, and business intelligence can help us increase sales by 5 percent.”

Role of an executive sponsor

Executive sponsors support the BI effort in the following ways:

• Articulate commitment to the initiative and to the impact it will have on the organization.
• State the business intelligence vision in the context of the company’s strategy. They may help craft this vision.
• Approve budget
• Clear political barriers
• Act as the go-to person for ultimate resolution of issues that can not be resolved by the BI team or the BI Steering Committee. Such issues are rarely technical in nature and more often involve prioritization, organizational issues, and project scope.
• Executive sponsors are seldom involved in the day-to-day tasks and issues of the BI Team.

Best practices for successful BI

Executive support is one of the most important secrets to successful BI and the degree to which BI contributes to business performance. Fail to garner executive level support and your project will be met with only moderate success, perhaps in isolated deployments.

Recognize that the best executive sponsor is one who has credibility and influence with all the business units and functions, not just with IT or just with finance.

The sponsoring executive may change throughout the BI life cycle.

Until you can prove the value of BI, some executives will skeptically think that BI is just another IT drain on investment dollars.

If you have been diligently following all the other best practices in this book and still don’t have executive level support, face the harsh reality that your company may never fully appreciate the value of business intelligence without exogenous change.

Excerpt from ‘Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App’ by Cindi Howson. Reproduced with permission © 2008, Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited. E-mail: Vishwanath_Ghanekar@mcgraw-hill.com