In any given organization, there are a few BI projects that are marked as "suffering." I have been asked many a times as to why some projects in the BI psace are very successful and others suffer? The answer is very simple in my opinion. If your BI project is owned and driven by the business, the project has a potential to be very successful, on the other hand if your IT owns and drives the BI projects, chances of business aligning to use the end solution and adopt to it are not very high. Is organizational alignment the only answer?.
Not at all. The key to getting a successful BI implementation lies with both Business and IT teams. But the underlying goal is to identify the business pain of the organization as related to BI and then implementing a solution to address that pain. But it does not stop there, you need a strong business sponsor and a strong technical sponsor to go toe to toe on solving the problem. I'm seeing certain large corporations fail because of issues from Business or IT communities within the organizations. My thought for these companies is to get your internal act together with a steering committee, sort out the issues and establish the goals of how your BI projects will succeed. Without a shared vision and a joint ownership of the solution architecture, the BI project will definitely suffer before it becomes successful.
While organizational alignment and project governance are enablers to these goals, the people from the different parts of the organization coming together is the fundamental key to ensure success. I wish all the projects in the BI space to be a success and raise a toast in this anticipation.
Posted May 7, 2008 8:03 PM
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Krish, I'd like to point out that it is a nearly universal misconception that organizations are divided between IT and business. This duality does not exist. The "business" itself is composed of a ragged hierarchy of formal and ad hoc organizations. I strongly believe that any analysis of the situation that is based in "alignment" of these two non-existent groups is faulty.
Shared vision still entails an IT organization delivering tools for others. This hasn't worked and it never will.
-NR