Blog: William McKnight

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UK business intelligence projects hitting target

This article from TechWorld is titled “UK business intelligence projects not hitting target” and starts with “A huge 87 percent of business intelligence projects are failing to meet their original objectives, and nearly a quarter are going over budget, according to new research.”

Wow!

Now, I’m not one to overhype business intelligence success, which I think most of what I read actually does. However, let’s dissect this using the facts of the study.

“The survey of 68 senior IT decision makers in the UK, conducted by the National Computing Centre for data management vendor Sybase, revealed serious disappointment in business intelligence projects, after 85 percent of those interviewed had implemented the technology in order to improve management decision making.“

OK, the only fact there is that 85 percent of those interviewed had implemented BI. The “serious disappointment” is developed in the rest of the story. Or is it?

“Nearly a third of the IT managers were disappointed that the business intelligence operations themselves were slow and laborious, and over a fifth found the data failed to reveal important information.”

So, 2/3 were not disappointed in one potential negative of BI – that is is slow and laborious. And almost 80% found the data revealed important information.

“Only just over half, 54 percent, said end user satisfaction levels were as expected or better.”

You could replace “only just over half” with “More than half”. It’s also difficult to apply one satisfaction metric to an entire body of users. This could be taken to mean that 46% of implementations have just one user for which BI is not meeting expectations.

“Nevertheless, two thirds of interviewees reported that business performance was improved by the technology and 56 percent saw more accurate data. And 54 percent of respondents were confident enough in the technology to extend it to other parts of the business.”

Yes!

I don’t see where the 87% in the opening comes from because that does not jive with the statistics mentioned. Anyway, attention grabbing headlines like this need to be balanced so that's why this blog entry is so titled.

Technorati tags: Data Warehouse, Business Intelligence

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