How to hasten BI adoption

By Christina Torode, SearchCIO.com | Jun 15, 2009

The quick adoption of business intelligence tools is crucial to success.  Below are some expert tips for overcoming the hurdles of slow adoption.

Make sure you have completed a proof of concept with a business group that shows the potential of what your BI implementation can do. By demonstrating what can be accomplished in one group, an organization will open the door for others to follow, rather than employing a "build it and they will come" mentality.

Too often, companies get bogged down with enterprise-wide strategies rather than rolling them out group by group. "Users aren't going to see the potential of BI or the software until you show them the possibilities," said Marcus Collins, an analyst at Midvale, Utah-based Burton Group Inc.

The BI team at The Allstate Corp. in Northbrook now has business units queueing up to be the next candidate for BI, but that wasn't always the case. To jump-start the program, a dashboard for customer complaints was built.  It worked so well that it snowballed into requests from business units that want to leverage that data. Until then, the company's BusinessObjects tool wasn't being put to use very often.

Spend more time evangelizing the capabilities of your BI tools.

Part of this marketing effort is admitting what didn't work. "A BI initiative is a continuous learning process with successes and failures," Collins said. "Something that organizations should do is create a learning library for users that documents those successes and failures."