Practical training, executive buy-in key to BI user Adoption

During any business intelligence (BI) deployment, organizations focus on the technical details – for example, determining the number of servers needed to support the system, choosing the data sources to be integrated, and deciding how often to refresh the data warehouse.

But in a BI deployment aimed at non-power users, addressing cultural barriers to ensure that the system is actually adopted throughout the enterprise is often just as important as mastering the technical specifications. Giving short shrift to these non-technical concerns could result in a BI manager's worst nightmare – a successfully installed, complex and expensive BI system that no one uses.

While power users, like business analysts, need little incentive to adopt BI technology, more casual BI users, such as marketing and sales associates and line-of-business managers, are a different story.

For adoption to truly take off among these users, it is important for IT and BI staff to educate them on how the technology will help them achieve personal and departmental business goals. Less important to these users are the BI system's various eye-catching features that might impress a more sophisticated user.

If a salesperson has a goal to find a certain number of new customers in a quarter, for example, the BI staff should show him or her how the new report or dashboard will help achieve that goal, rather than giving a lecture on how many different views of the data are available.

The best way to sell corporate executives, and ultimately casual users, on BI is "by realworld war-gaming and simulations, which can provoke seminal 'a-ha' moments".

"[That is] the best and maybe the only way to demonstrate the merits of real business intelligence."

At the Canadian newspaper, executives were having trouble understanding circulation reports. The data just "didn't mean anything to them,". Recognizing the importance of executive buy-in to maintain BI funding and to encourage wider adoption of the technology.

But whether it's focusing on practical training, facilitating communication, or getting executives to lead by example, the IT and BI staffs to remember that promoting end-user adoption of BI systems is an ongoing process, and not an easy one at that.

Remember: "It's not going to be done in one day or two days”, "It's hard."