Whitepaper. Avoid Getting Blamed for Failed Analytics Projects.

Transcription

1 Whitepaper Avoid Getting Blamed for Failed Analytics Projects

2 The Current BI Marketplace So much has already been said about the pains of business intelligence and analytics (BI) software: the complexity, the constant IT bottlenecks, and the high cost of hardware, software, implementation and consultants. Due to the many limitations and challenges business intelligence imposes, BI vendors select a few issues to tackle, and position themselves as the best at addressing those specific issues. Some vendors focus on providing easy-to-use front-end tools for the business user, some on handling complex ETL scenarios and large data sets, and others on open source software that removes software licensing costs. In Need of an Overhaul BI vendors continuously roll out new functionality and technology, but the industry is at a standstill: No major progress has been made in expanding these new capabilities to the wider market that can't afford long and costly development/customization cycles. In fact, only those companies that sell enterprise-class solutions such as SAP, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft, have been able to show significant growth but leave the niche players behind.

3 BI can deliver on its promise, but only with a complete overhaul. As long as vendors focus their time on improving individual functions rather than turning the entire paradigm on its head, no progress will be made. The traditional paradigm needs to be scrapped and replaced by something that is easier, faster, cheaper and more manageable. The Inherent Flaw in the Traditional BI Paradigm So what is the core of traditional BI problems? The traditional paradigm contains an inherent flaw that prevents BI from going to the next level where ROI is indisputable and business users get another powerful tool added to their arsenal - for companies of all (or most) sizes. If you search "why business intelligence projects fail" in Google you will find an abundance of white papers and articles, mostly written by BI vendors, giving their top reasons. When a vendor determines which failure points to address, it s in their best interest to address the problems that they solve and their competitors don t. Marketing 101. Fair enough.

4 There s one reason BI vendors all seem to agree on for a project's failure: the lack of up-front planning There is one reason which they all seem to agree on for a project's failure and that is the lack of up-front planning. For a BI project to succeed, project requirements must be compiled in advance, all the relevant parties must be consulted (IT, business departments and executives) and the project must be planned in accordance with those requirements. Otherwise, the project is destined to fail. In other words, you, the consumer, can always be blamed if a project fails. Had you planned ahead (i.e. planned around their product limitations), the project would have been a success and you wouldn't have wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of software licenses, hardware and personnel time. Changing Requirements Are Inevitable Sadly, they have a point. Since traditional solutions aren't very sympathetic to unplanned changes from an architectural point of

5 view, anything you don't think of in advance is difficult and expensive to introduce later. So be sure to think long and hard about what you need now and in the future, because any requirements you miss could mean the difference between a successful project and a failure. No matter how much experience you have, it is impossible to know in advance what your future requirements will be when it comes to BI. BI is highly dynamic, and requirements constantly changing. But herein lies the catch. It doesn't matter who you are or how much experience you have, it is utterly impossible to know in advance what your future requirements as business challenges change. Business users come up with new ideas at every turn. The report just requested will not be the same report needed tomorrow, analysis done now may only be relevant for a short period of time and meaningless shortly thereafter. Most importantly - if you are a department or company seeking an analytics solution without any BI development experience, you have no way of knowing how a particular requirement will affect the architecture of your solution. You could easily find yourself disregarding the immediate testing of some particular capability because it seems trivial to you, only to discover later that the entire

6 solution comes tumbling down when you actually try to use it, or even worse, that the system is useless without it. No Room for Agility Traditional BI vendors were the ones who made up the rules for this game over 10 years ago. They are the ones who have aggressively promoted a paradigm where everything needs to be thought of in advance - otherwise you are sure to fail. While this is logical for vendors that focus on enterprise-wide BI for fortune 500 companies where the complexity of a project is masked by the complexity of the corporation's own business processes, it doesn t make sense for most other company. Enterprise organizations are used to things taking years to fully launch because every other process they have has taken that as much time. Unfortunately, agile organizations can t afford to make these mistakes but the current BI paradigms make it almost impossible to succeed. Innovative Companies are Becoming the Top Choice Make no mistake, it's always good to plan ahead. However, future BI requirements are practically impossible to predict and even harder to measure until the business user applies them to real data - in real-life

7 scenarios - over time. You can t do this with traditional BI without investing a lot of resources beforehand, and even then you have no guarantees. Get the same class of business intelligence without compromising on functionality, speed or capacity by choosing a more innovative BI vendor--a rising stars in the marketplace. There are ways to change the get the same class of business intelligence without compromising on functionality, speed or capacity and that is to turn towards the more innovative BI vendors, as opposed to the traditional players who have over-sized BI developer eco-systems they support. Younger, innovative BI companies armed with new technologies, fresh ideas and sensible pricing models can make agile BI possible. Next Steps: Try Sisense for FREE Join a Sisense Analytics Expert for a Weekly Live Demo Contact us