Business Intelligence: Some Worst Practices
April 16, 2019
AI has the business intelligence field booming, but not every company uses these tools as well as they could. ITWeb shares a white paper titled, “The Top Five Worst Practices in Business Intelligence,” produced by Information Builders. We wonder—why only five? Oh well, perhaps there will be a sequel. The paper’s introduction states:
“Companies of all sizes suffer from countless oversights and poor judgment calls during planning, tool selection, and rollout – mistakes that can be detrimental to BI success. Even the smartest, best-run businesses in the world commit the common missteps that doom BI projects to shelfware and failure.
The worst practices have been shaped by subjective methods. Accurate? Judge for yourself.
The first worst practice listed is Depending on Humans to Operationalize Insights; be sure analytics are embedded alongside insights, we’re warned. Next is Expecting Self-Service BI to Address All Your Needs. Though some users can make use of self-service BI, advanced users need more flexibility, while executives require summaries and alerts. Then we have Underestimating the Importance of Data Preparation, which we agree cannot be over emphasized. (The old adage garbage-in-garbage-out comes to mind.) At number four is Using Tactical BI Tools to Support Broad BI Strategies—a hodgepodge of specific tools will fail to address the needs of the larger organization; both discovery tools and summary apps are required. Finally, Ignoring Important Data Sources rounds out the list; specifically, we’re told:
“BI initiatives tend to focus on the information contained in ERP and CRM applications, relational databases, data warehouses and marts, and other enterprise systems. However, important other data sources, such as machine-generated, mobile, location, social media, and web monitoring data, which contain a wealth of crucial insight, have emerged. Today, IDC estimates that as much as 90 percent of available content is unstructured, residing in various formats and places.”
See the white paper, downloadable for free here, for more details on each point. It is worth noting the paper concludes by promoting Information Builders’ own platform, WebFOCUS, to guard against such mistakes. Still, the list could be helpful if taken with that salt grain.
Is business intelligence an oxymoron?
Cynthia Murrell, April 16, 2019
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