Why Most BI Projects Fail

I get called into a lot of failed projects and efforts, that's the bad news. The good news is that most people do not want to fail. Most people want to succeed and BI is no different.

The following are common ways BI efforts fail and what can be done to avoid failure...

Lack of Vision

You have reporting requirements. You have source data. But how do you put it all together? No, not just the nuts and bolts of data architecture/integration but what does your data need to do for you?

Who are your customers? What is important to them? Do you have a vision that aligns with their goals? If your customers don't believe in your BI vision they won't support you and your project will die on the vine.

Solution: Find out what's important to your business before breaking ground on a new project.

Experience Required

Assuming you have a great BI vision for your business, do you have the right people in the right places to make it happen? You've asked a sponsor to trust you on your project, can you trust your team?

It takes decades of experience to deliver successful BI solutions. And even then, many can't do it without significant support.

Some of my clients believe they can hire internal resources to fill experience gaps. I've seen some amazing resumes that look better than mine only find out later the resource couldn't deliver and was afraid to ask for help.

Solution: Partner with proven consultants to help get an initiative off the ground. Give internal resources the time and space to train up. Make time for knowledge transfer and documentation at the end of the engagement to insure a successful hand off.

Overwhelmed by Requirements

A data hungry organization can often be the hardest to please. Technical requirements and specifications are a great way to understand what is being asked but these are seldom a roadmap to getting the work done.

Worse, these requirements can obscure an organization's long term BI needs while creating inefficiencies. Do you have multiple versions of the same report? Are your ETL developers creating new fact tables for the same data with different business rules? Is your time going to operational reporting instead of analytics? These are bad signs. Solution: Build time in development cycles for strategy and loop in all members of your BI team. Reduce redundancies where ever possible to keep the team moving forward.