Business Intelligence Issues

Here is a summary of the key business intelligence issues today divided into two categories –

• Organizations and People
• Data and Technology

Here is summary of some of the main business intelligence issues found in both categories.

Organizations and People

1) Management within your organisation are not convinced that data driven or evidence based decisions really works for them. They prefer to run the operation from instinct.

2) There is no clear overall business strategy laid out with objectives and measures related to those objectives to assess business progress.

3) IT personnel are overloaded and have no resource available to source the data you need for your Business Intelligence (BI)system.

4) There are no incentives for the staff within your organisation to improve the performance of the business either using BI or not.

5) The business is in a state of stress or high change or flux. There is no apparent or perceived time to establish a BI system.

6) The eventual consumers of the BI system do not really know what they want from a BI system until they see it. This means lots of changes are required to the solution before it is accepted.

7) IT experts building the system do not really understand the business, and so many changes are needed to have the system accepted by the organisation.

8) The company does not have sufficient expertise or is not able to hire such expertise to manage a project implementation on time and within budget or to design the system adequately.

1) The data of the organisation is not clean and the time and effort to correct this or handle this, destroys the success of the BI project.

For example, there are many different coding systems for the same objects or entities in different systems e.g. customer is coded differently in the Finance system to that held in the Sales system. Also there could be many different definitions for the same item.

2) The BI technology chosen turns out to be so rigid and painstaking to change that the takes too long and costs too much to complete the project on time.

3) The BI technology used deters use of the system because:

• The quality of the presentation or visualisation of the information is poor or limited.
• The response times (speed) to present the data is too slow and not acceptable.
• The flexibility to ask new questions of the BI technology is limited or too difficult or time consuming to do for either the End Users or BI expert.

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