MS BI Conference 2 - Gartner session

A guy from the Gartner group talked on "Building a Plan of Success and avoiding the Five Fatal Flaws of Business Intelligence".

 His slides were amateurly formatted, and he had lots_of random_underscores on them_so I was left wondering_why? He also crammed too much stuff on his slides - not strictly text, but diagrams and clipart and labels and arrows.

 He had a table that was promising, essentially it was a BI maturity model, the characteristics of each level of maturity, what are the likely ways to fail at each level. The first level was Opportunistic. The 2nd was "tactical" and the third level was "strategic". I'd put the furniture manufacturer I was working with on BI a few months ago at the tactical level.

His five fatal flaws were:

1. If you think there are only five flaws, you are destined to fail.

2. "If we build it, they will come."  We like to anticipate the needs of users, and we often think that users don't understand what they do need, so we will solve their problems.

3. "Managers need to dance with their numbers." He often hears "we need a flexible spreadsheet interface that allows us to work with the latest numbers." His experience is that most managers don't like to make decisions anyway, if the numbers point them to a particular decision, they will dispute the numbers, rather than make a decision. Often, managers who make decisions can get fired.

4. "Our enterprise application vendor will deliver the best BI solution." He hears "we just spent $10M on an ERP, and now you are telling me we need a BI solution? A data warehouse is free, integration means its easy."

5. "Data Quality. What data quality problem?"  Your boss doesn't like you if he makes you responsible for data quality. IT tries to solve this with a tool, but its more about governance and ownership. There should be a "Data Quality Firewall" with SLA"s and quality metrics.

6. "Darwin was wrong. Our BI apps don't need to evolve."

7. "We can just outsource the whole thing."

8. "Just give me a dashboard. How hard can it be?"