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Promoting Your Business Intelligence Initiative

Published: October 7, 2008

To leverage business intelligence, business users need to understand the value of business intelligence and how it can help them.

I recently had the opportunity to facilitate birds-of-a-feather sessions on improving the success of business intelligence (BI). One of the more popular tables: promoting BI to increase adoption. Not sexy tools. Not fixing bad data. It was simple, soft selling – a sometimes uncomfortable and harder thing for IT professionals to do.

IT is in the service business after all, so why should anyone have to sell business users on the idea of business intelligence? It’s partly because business intelligence is value added and not obviously essential to many users. It requires a more proactive, promotional approach. Business intelligence also demands promotion because it is still relatively new as a technical innovation so few business users know all the myriad ways BI can be leveraged.
 

One of the most effective promotional tools is an elevator pitch. So before I spoil the surprise, take a minute and write down your 1-minute elevator pitch as it stands today. Assume a business person met you in the elevator asked you these questions: What are you working on? What’s this data warehouse all about? Write down your 1-minute answer. Or, post here, and I will pull out 3 interesting pitches and provide commentary – otherwise known as free consulting.

To effectively promote business intelligence, you first need to apply some marketing concepts to your BI deployment.  Fail to do this first and at best you will have zero impact and at worst come across as a glorified technocrat trying to justify your existence. 

The BI Marketing Plan

Marketing is about focusing on what customers need so providers can build better products they’ll actually use. It’s the strategy that goes into the BI application before you begin touting it as your company’s killer app.

Enlist the help of your internal marketing and/or communications department to develop a formal marketing plan for your BI initiative. A marketing plan contains the following items, some of which will overlap with your project plan:

• Situation Analysis – Covers your current situation, competitive analysis, and strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis.
  
  
• Marketing Mix – Involves the four P’s of marketing: product, price, promotion and place. For most BI deployments, product and promotion are the most relevant P’s, unless you are selling BI capabilities to external customers.
  
  
• Market Segments – Divide your customers and users into different groups. Both your BI product and promotional techniques should be tailored to each of these segments.
  
  
• Objectives – Includes how you will measure your marketing and communication effectiveness. Ultimately, this may be the ROI for your BI deployment, but incrementally it may be number of users trained, number of promotional efforts or number of queries run.

Situation Analysis

A BI deployment faces competition on many fronts. Your goal is to identify and understand the sources of competition and recognize how the BI application is better. Gut-feel decision making may be one of BI’s biggest competitors. So too are renegade spreadmarts, information hoarders and even the source systems themselves. A SWOT analysis can be an effective tool in discovering the BI solution’s strengths as well as identifying low cost opportunities for improvement.

Following is a sample SWOT analysis:

Strengths: Common business definitions, global information, complete information, self-service access, historical data

Weaknesses: Data quality issues, slow queries, data that is only updated weekly (too late for timely action)

Opportunities: Canned reports and dashboards with guaranteed response times

Threats: Custom-coded reports against the ERP system expanding, departments buying their own BI tools and writing their own extracts

Perfectionists at heart, many data warehouse and BI professionals tend to focus on the weaknesses of a SWOT, yet users often see the situation differently.

IT Perception: The data warehouse won’t be usable until all the data quality issues are solved!

User Reality: Some data is better than no data. Just tell me where it’s wrong.

IT Perception: Users want real-time data so the data warehouse is useless until updates are daily! 

User Reality: Some users do need real-time data; but if users are doing trend analysis with history and aggregates, then weekly updates are fine.

Product

Easy, it’s a data warehouse (or BI tool or dashboard, etc.)!  No, not quite. First, data warehouse can be a dirty word in some organizations, particularly those new to business intelligence. Call it a data mart, data staging, anything but a data warehouse that suggests expensive and years to build. Second, the data warehouse is only a piece of technology and not your end product.

To develop a key message, you need to translate the features of your BI deployment to the benefits of business intelligence.

Are you delivering a data warehouse? No, you are delivering a customer retention / inventory optimization / product profitability / [substitute your own BI application here] solution!

Some companies also develop engaging product names for their BI application. Below are a few examples:

Apollo – Greek god of truth, Corporate Express

OASIS – Online Analytic Sales Information System

Honeycomb – Burt’s Bees

Promotion

Many people equate marketing with promotion; but if you haven’t done the earlier analysis of the competition, SWOT and product, your promotional efforts will fall flat. When you promote business intelligence to business users, promote the business benefits. Use a variety of media and use it often.  This is another thing that BI teams are uncomfortable with. “I told them about it once, why do I need to tell them again?”

People need to hear the same messages multiple times before the benefits and value will sink in. Do you ever see a commercial just once? No, you see and hear the same promotion on television, the Web and print media repeatedly. Following are some useful media to effectively promote your BI initiative:

Webinars: Use short but periodic webinars to communicate business success stories, project milestones and future BI initiatives to a broad user base.

Road shows: When companies first start building or even reinvigorating a BI initiative, many have corresponding information sessions about what is coming, what capabilities will be delivered in a particular phase, how to engage with the BI team and so on. Road shows can provide valuable forums for dialogue in understanding users’ needs and concerns about the BI effort.

Company newsletters: Existing corporate newsletters are excellent media for communicating high level messages to a broad audience.

Training classes: Training sessions should go beyond the straight how-to’s and address the benefits and business application of the data.

Brown bag lunches/lunch ‘n learns: These provide a useful follow-up to training and another opportunity to raise awareness about best practices, success stories and benefits.

Internal user conferences: Just as software vendors host user conferences, so should companies. Kick off the meeting with a review of the benefits, project milestones and a key success story. If your executive-level sponsor can’t attend in person, record a testimonial or message as a video clip. Structure sessions to enable users to share tips and techniques on both the how-to in the BI tools as well as organizational issues in achieving measurable benefits.

Staff meetings: Most departments and business units have regularly scheduled staff meetings. Ask for 5 minutes on the agenda each quarter. A real sign of increasing adoption is when the department invites you and requests 30 minutes!

The elevator pitch: The elevator pitch is your one-minute pitch on what is BI and the value it brings to your company or business unit. Every member of the BI team should be well versed in the elevator pitch. Know it, practice it, and repeat it.

So let’s go back to the elevator pitch you wrote at the start of this article. Review what you wrote. Cross out the techno babble. Replace features with benefits. Post your revised elevator pitch here.

Beyond the elevator speech, the BI team leader and members are not necessarily the best promoters, but they do have to ensure promotions are part of the project plan. The best promoters are the executive-level sponsors and user testimonials.

BI User Segments

Lastly, all this marketing strategy needs to be tailored by BI user segment. Your BI customers are not only current BI users who log onto the system, they are also:

• The decision makers who rely on data and analyses (but who may not log on),
  
  
• The gatekeepers who provide custom reports and create spreadmarts, and
  
  
• The broad base of people who still don’t know what BI is all about.

You determine your customer segments by differences in the full potential user base. These differences could be based on job level, job function, data literacy, and ERP versus non ERP users.

Let’s look at three potential segments and how the BI marketing is tailored to each. 

Conclusion

In a tough economy, business intelligence can help companies weather the downturn, beat the competition and operate more efficiently. But to leverage business intelligence, business users need to understand the value of business intelligence and how it can help them. Because business intelligence is a value-add and new technology, BI teams need to ensure they are actively promoting it.

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