Making your BI program world-class

We recently ran across an article from Timo Elliott, answering the question of “What Does a World-Class BI Program Look Like?” He writes that successful programs incorporate five separate elements:

• Focus on changing the business
• Focus on people
• Provide some simple data access for everyone
• Tell stories
• Stick with it

The end result, he writes, is that a world-class BI program “successfully changes the information culture of the organization.” We agree, but we’d go a little bit further.

• Successful BI implementations are game-changers. They don’t merely take what you’re already doing and make it a little better; they move you into a completely new realm of possibilities. In traditional programs, BI can be used to better understand customer thinking, help predict their future behavior and anticipate their needs. More recently, as the size of data sets have exploded (the so-called “Big Data” initiative), billions of customer transactions are being analyzed in a fraction of the time it used to require, providing near real-time understanding of market trends. Specialties such as sentiment analysis and the mining of social data are newcomers, but would not have been possible without the technology improvements of the last several years.

• WIIFM? Marketers everywhere will recognize this acronym; it means “What’s in it for me?” Simply put, a successful BI program must contain a WIIFM for everyone who interacts with it, from the C-suite all the way down to the customer service reps on the front lines. Good BI implementations no longer require oodles of time, money or personnel commitment: the emergence of BI SaaS programs, like our Data Warehousing as a Service, means that programs can be quickly implemented and begin producing tangible results at a fraction of the cost it used to take. The WIIFM for those who need the data is obvious; the WIIFM for your CFO is equally so.

• Fulfill the vision. The beauty of BI SaaS, as well as market-driven improvements such as analytical appliances on commodity hardware, is that companies can move quickly to test out the potential benefits of BI initiatives. Things like ROI and TCO have never been more important than they are in today’s economy; BI’s evolution has made it possible to imagine what your company could do with a greater level of insight and to actually implement it, rather than leaving the vision on the wish list indefinitely.

Above all else, we’d expand Timo’s thinking: well-strategized BI programs, properly implemented, change not only the “information culture of the organization.” They change the organization itself, as well as every person who comes into contact with it.