Hubble is a registered trademark of International. 2014-2015 International. All Rights Reserved.
Table of Contents CHAPTER 1 The Struggle is Real CHAPTER 2 Why this Approach Doesn t Always Work CHAPTER 3 Why BI Projects Fail CHAPTER 4 If BI Isn t Right, What Do I Look For?
Know the risks Business Intelligence (BI) was once a shiny new toy. It quickly infiltrated the IT market. And as more solutions started to appear, and more people started to invest in big implementations, we began to see the results of data warehousing both good and bad. Gartner has found that despite years of companies investing in BI, many IT organizations have difficulty connecting BI with the business, and getting business users fully involved and out of the Excel culture. The question is, if BI was created to provide access to and analysis of information in your ERP, what s happening here? Companies look to BI as the answer, but tend to confuse the concept of BI with a software solution. The concept of BI makes sense providing analytics and insight to drive business performance. But BI solutions in the market require additional infrastructure that force you to extract data out of the system of record. In the end, companies end up pushing to Excel to format and investigate data. For some, BI is the correct solution. But given that there are diverse information requirements from many different roles in the business, and BI can come with a hefty price tag, understanding all the risks of BI before you invest is key. This ebook explores the needs of different users in your organization, the flaws of BI, and how you can actively de-risk your project. 02
The Struggle is Real Reporting and analyzing data in your ERP can be an inflexible, technical process. BI entered the market as a solution for companies who struggled to access information from this critical business system. But the ERP world is so complex that it turned BI vendors off. So they decided to build a new world where they could start from a blank sheet. But this meant that BI was suddenly a parallel strategy to the ERP which is the original source of truth. Once a data warehouse is implemented, the reporting process can become unwieldy. When it s time to run reports, data will be extracted from the ERP, manipulated in a data warehouse, and then fed into a BI solution. If you are looking backwards at historical data, it s great. The numbers you did yesterday won t change. However, if you are trying to look forward to do analysis to drive the business, you will be working from stale data. Anything added to the ERP from the time you export out to when your users consume the report will not be included in your numbers. Reports often have to be run overnight creating a data lag that can back up the business. 03
Why this Approach Doesn t Always Work Unfortunately, this type of approach to reporting can create polarity between IT users and business users. When it comes to reporting, the needs and drivers between the two groups can be vastly different. As an IT professional, you want to bring control to a reporting process that is vastly chaotic. There are a number of complex spreadsheets and disparate systems in the organization and this brings disorder to the business. Different data from different systems producing different results does not reflect well on the underlying systems. IT s natural approach is to want to get control of the situation, put all reporting data in one place, consolidate it by a single set of rules, and deliver it to the business. However (and this is a big however), finance and end users come at reporting from a very different perspective. The end users may agree with the need for fast, reliable, consistent data, but they can easily lose patience with the process that handcuffs the access to information. What end users want is a fast, easy solution that is flexible enough to meet their daily needs. As an IT professional, you may have experienced this disconnect before when you implemented your ERP. You probably spent days locked away with your implementation partner setting up complex coding structures and DFF s so you could group and analyse data in a particular way only to find that the business couldn t access it the way it was needed. 04
What do People Want? So what is it that the business user wants access to? As an IT professional, you are responsible for aligning systems to the business needs. When it comes to data and information, needs and requirements will change based on roles, responsibilities and departments. While some users may want to see summary information, some may want to see transactions. While some might need to see corporate goals in a dashboard, some may want the ability to drilldown to source data. For example: A C-Level executive typically just wants to see the information in a way that s quick, easy, and makes sense to them. Consolidated data from the past, present, and future, predictive analytics, dashboards, and KPIs are all key for this type of employee. They want to monitor data, and look at it weekly or monthly to keep a pulse on the business. Accounting and Finance teams are responsible for the numbers, and for fueling the business with information to help them make dayto-day and strategic decisions. For this reason, they crave real-time reporting that is easy and quick to do. It s important for them to have both consolidated and transactional data, and be able to drilldown to investigate easily and run ad hoc inquiries when needed. Department heads are strictly consumers on information. Their responsibility is to know how things are going in their department. For them, real-time transactional reporting and ad hoc inquiry is key so they can answer their business questions as they arise. 05
Why BI Projects Fail Given the diversity of reporting requirements throughout the business, is it too much to ask for one single solution that delivers everything? If the solution is a BI solution that sits outside of your source of truth, your ERP, then the answer is a resounding yes. Let s take a deeper look into by BI fails and how this can be fatal to your organization: 1. Business can t agree on what it really wants There is a common misconception that if you buy BI, it will be successful. After all, many companies invest millions in BI solutions if they are doing it, there has to be some real, tangible value that anyone can experience. This isn t true. Nearly all BI vendors have the same proportion of stars and skeletons. There are a number of things that determine BI success, including, company culture, requirements definition, implementing without knowing what questions need to be answered, project management, etc. Additionally, IT is often the group that implements the BI project. As we saw before, sometimes your needs and the business needs are not one and the same. If it is implemented without considering the whole business, come roll out time, the business won t find value, and they won t use it. All of a sudden the BI solution you spent all that time and money implementing becomes shelfware. 2. It fails the RACT test RACT stands for Relevant, Accurate, Consistent, and Timely. Many companies implement BI and find that it fails on all four of these levels. This often means they have to spend even more money to make the solution work the way it needs to this may mean additional tools, consulting hours, training hours, or more overhead. 06
WHY BI PROJECTS FAIL Some Important Questions... To determine whether BI will pass or fail the RACT test at your company, ask yourself: Is it relevant? What is the true business problem we are trying to solve here? Do we simply need a tool for standard reports that hardly change, or do we need our business users to have access to timely information all the time so they can answer business questions as they need to? Will it deliver accurate data? If the processes within your data warehouse will produce inaccurate data (meaning, it s not realtime) then it will breed distrust in the organization. Trust in data is important to ensure business leaders feel confident enough to make strategic and day-to-day decisions off of it. Is it consistent? If at any point, users are exporting data into excel to understand it and investigate into it further, then you will start to see many more errors in your information. If your BI solution will still force users to use offline spreadsheets or other databases to manipulate and store data, then only chaos will ensue. Will information be timely? Will users be able to get information they need, when they need it? If the process requires a latency, it will provides less value to the business. 3. Company can t adapt to the change One thing that can be sure about a BI project is that requirements will change and user expectations and appetite will mature. It s just the nature of business and humans, isn t it? Within the first year, people want to make changes to 35-50 of the application. Often the cure for this is to make sure that end users can answer their own ad hoc questions and pull their own reports as they need to. This way, as requirements and needs change, the solution has the flexibility to move with it. If this is not possible in your BI solution, then you will often have to resort to more technical resources and consulting hours to adhere to the business needs. 4. Lack of planning BI solutions are large, complex projects. It s important to not overlook the amount of effort and time that can go into this implementation before, during, and after. Every single nuance needs to be well thought out prior to launch. 5. Misjudged total cost of ownership Although it may not seem so at first, often software costs are the smallest line item on the overall cost of the BI solution. Ask yourself, when you include the hardware, the professional services, the training, the resources, and the opportunity cost, where do you land? If you foresee your BI solution taking months to implement and roll out, stop before your start. There are options that exist that can give you all the benefits you need, without the hassle of a long implementation. 07
If BI Isn t Right, What Do I Look For? If you find that you ve evaluated BI as an option, and it may not fit into your company, what s next? What should you look for in a reporting solution? Focus on the ERP The single biggest reason that reporting processes fail is because data is removed from the ERP. The ERP is the source of truth for your organization, and the moment data leaves it, data becomes static and stale. But what is a company to do when the reporting options within the ERP aren t robust and flexible enough? If you look for a solution that integrates directly with your ERP in real-time, you can ensure that all your data always remains in once place. If you are pulling in data from other sources, make sure it all comes back into the ERP. This will remove the need to export to Excel and reformat, and as a result, will eliminate data errors, static data, and multiple versions of the truth. Don t make the business reliant on IT Trust us on this one you do not want the whole business reliant on you for reports. If IT is constantly bogged down with report requests, they will spend all their time collecting specs and creating reports, and not focusing on strategic IT projects that help drive performance. Focus on finding a solution that actually enables the end user to securely create their own reports. Even better, find a solution that is flexible enough to allow users to answer their ad hoc requests on their own. The means less questions back to accounting and IT for more details on answers. 08
NOW WHAT? HOW TO CHANGE THINGS FOR THE BETTER Just Make Sure It s Real-Time The power of real-time is truly invaluable. Data warehouses create data latency that can slow down the speed of business. This only creates frustrated users that end up exporting to Excel to find the answers themselves. The ability to run reports and ad hoc queries in real-time can speed up the reporting, and all the backend processes that go along with it. When end users have the power to create and run their own real-time reports, IT can pull themselves out of the report creating business and focus on driving their other initiatives throughout the organization. Want to see where Hubble fits into all of this, visit gohubble.com Hubble is an integrated suite of performance management apps from. It offers reporting, analytics and planning in a single real-time solution that fully understands your ERP. Hubble integrates your critical business systems so users at all levels have access to live data extraordinarily fast. With this type of visibility, everyone can easily understand, manage and predict the business. Hubble is a registered trademark of International. 2014-2015 International. All Rights Reserved.