3. Investment

(ACW) Like any IT project, BI projects require investment in time, money and human effort. The investment can seem too steep for the payoff for some. Why do BI projects suffer from a perceived lack of ROI?

(DC) This is the topic of a much longer post, but with Warren Buffet talking about recession, I suspect we’ll see a renewed interest in both ROI and TCO of all software investments. Over the years many people have taken a crack at going beyond the “better decisions” that BI has promised since the earliest days of EIS and DSS. I think this article by Jonathan Wu written in 2000 still holds up, and certainly shines a light on the expense side of on-premise approaches in terms of hardware, software, and labor costs.

4. Just another Buzz phase

(ACW) Like many of the must have technologies that have propagated through international corporations, from CASE tools in the 80’s to WEB2.0 today. IT managers fear Business Intelligence for the masses will have limited usefulness and after the initial interest period will gather dust as people get on with their established ways of working. What is you view on this?

(DC) I haven’t seen this fear coming from IT, as BI continues to be the top priority of CIOs according to Gartner. I have seen this fear coming from the so-called “business users” who love the dashboard demos and then often don’t end up getting the timely, accurate, and relevant information they expected them to deliver. For BI to go beyond the currently abysmal adoption rates, it has to become much easier to set up, use, and even buy. There’s also a lot of market buzz around operational analytics - delivering real-time information in process. Look to see the mega-vendors push the “process-centric BI” message hard in the coming months as they promote their newly acquired add-on product lines.

5. What’s wrong with Excel? attitude!

(ACW) Business and IT groups have become used to using the tools they have at hand. Traditionally Excel is the application that people are quite comfortable for most of their data manipulation and reporting. Do IT managers believe it is sufficient for most staff?

(DC) I don’t have much to add to the original answer to the question. Excel has been a long-time friend and foe of the traditional BI vendors. The fact is that many people who have access to BI tools today still use them more like ETL tools as they pull data into Excel to perform personalized analysis. But how often do we hear about the pains associated with “Excel Hell”, spreadmarts, and “shadow IT“? And how much time do you want to spend compiling, manipulating, reconciling, and managing disparate spreadsheets? What if you could load them into an on-demand service that could aggregate, de-duplicate, and deliver actionable information?

6. Measurement

(ACW) CIO’s and business groups want to implement BI across the organization to drive new efficiencies, but once that decision is made. The next phase is to establish how to prove those efficiencies are occurring and that people are embracing the technologies benefits.

(DC) What if you could actually track and measure the adoption of business analytics? What if critical business analytics could be delivered as a subscription service? The value that is delivered becomes clear with the on-demand model as measurement and adoption are critical to both customer and vendor success. If you’re new to the SaaS model, be sure to read this recent Sandhill.com article which outlines the principles to which on-demand software vendors must adhere.

7. Executive expectations

(ACW) Often a key driver for a BI project is the executive team’s desire for a sexy (sic) business dashboard. Do many IT managers fear that the BI rollout will not meet the lofty goals executive have envisioned.

(DC) Eye-candy certainly gets the attention of the executives, but beware of what Stephen Few refers to as “Beauty at the Cost of Insight.” When it comes to data visualization, take a few minutes to take his Graph IQ Test and consider reading Wayne Eckerson’s book on Performance Dashboards. SaaS applications by their nature are designed to be more like consumer web applications like Amazon.com, Google, and eBay instead of the MISO soup enterprise software suites. This means for business analytics as a service to have an impact, dashboards will have to be “sexy”, but they’ll also need to be intuitive, personalized and relevant to individuals at all levels of the business.

8. Organization Size 

(ACW) Some organizations bypass Business Intelligence, in the belief that their smaller size or lower staff count will not benefit from business intelligence. They assume that BI is only relevant for government or fortune 500 companies. What is your take on this?

(DC) Just like salesforce.com in the early days, this is where SaaS BI has made the deepest inroads. While enterprise BI vendors focus on standardization and the all-important million dollar deal size metric, smaller organizations continue to lack the resources and internal skills needed to successfully implement their monolithic suites. Note that Aberdeen has published interesting research that shows SaaS BI moving quickly up market as “traditional approaches to expanding the use of BI applications to the enterprise have largely failed. Large, complex installations are proving to be beyond the existing BI skill sets and data integration and quality capabilities of most organizations.” And as Bob Warfield comments on his SmoothSpan blog, ”There are customers with real pain and minimal competition so far. The Giants are ill-positioned to jump in because of the disruptive business model that is SaaS.”

9. Data security and management.