Business Strategy

We spend a fair amount of time talking to people about drivers that lead to successful Business Intelligence (BI) implementations and drivers that progress organizations towards analytical maturity.  The most important drivers for success, in our experience, have more to do with organizational readiness, willingness to change and support of senior management than they do with a specific BI tool.

Mike and I presented at the Information Builders Chicago User Group meeting a couple of weeks ago, where we discussed the many considerations for a successful implementation of IBI's WebFOCUS application. (Here is the agenda for our upcoming encore in Milwaukee http://bit.ly/ncJtRI !).

We are currently involved on a number of "BI" initiatives and are noticing a recurring them - many implementations of BI software are not as successful as expected because of low adoption rates.  One common reason for low adoption rates is failure to adequately anticipate how the new BI technology will be used by the business.  If it is not clear how the technology will fit into the existing business processes or how processes will change, then people will be confused and not leverage new capability to its fullest extent.