Recently, I attended to a 3 days Business Intelligence summit, the content was excellent and the overall experience was positive thanks to the many case studies presented and the diversity/quality of the presenters.
This has prompted me to think the reasons why so many BI vendors fail to deliver their value proposition. So without further due, here are the five reasons why I believe Business Intelligence vendors fail:
5. Lack of standards
It’s 2008, the era of the web 2.0 and real time data modeling; most of the companies understand the value of being a data driven organization; yet we have not created standard processes and frameworks to execute the most common tasks of a BI Implementation.
What ETL process should you use? – OLAP, OLTP, In-memory Processing? – How do you represent the data?
4. Cost and ROI
The industry has done such a great job at making people think that analytics is rocket science, it is not. The more complex we present it, the more money we can get from the customer; well at some point we have to realize that this is going to continue to come back to us and it will only deteriorate the customer trust in the technology.
3. IT’s NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS!!!
Reporting Services are not enough you need dashboards… but wait, dashboards are not enough you need Alerts… and wait again; now you need surveys to really get the true picture. IS NOT ABOUT THE TOOLS; not sure why is so hard to understand that without proper processes, frameworks, goals and internal commitment; your BI solution is not going anywhere.
This was particular clear at the summit, every vendor will talk about their solution being the real solution that was going to allow the customer to get rid of the other vendor solution that were just a waste of money… you got that?
2. One size fits all
One of the most common mistakes is to think about the silver bullet approach; it works great during the sales pitch but the reality is, that the magic portal that is going to drive all the marketers to one page where they will gather insight and improve campaign performance by 100% DOES NOT EXIST.
Where are the true targeted options to consume the data?
1. Vendors in the driver’s seat
The best way to ensure you get the best value from your BI solution is to have the right people “internally” to work closely with your vendor in executing the “Internal” vision. Vendors are not interested in creating simple solutions to your problems; so as long as the vendors are driving the agenda you will not succeed.
