TDWI Executive Summit
By 
The TDWI Executive Summit was held last week in Vegas. While the theme was Agile Development & Alignment there was an under-current of the organizational impact on BI Programs. It seemed that for the first time BI Practitioners (many of them reformed IT Practitioners) have acknowledged the impact that the organizations ecosystem has on the success, and sometimes failure, of BI Programs. In this case, as in many, the first step is acknowledging there is a problem. The challenge now is how do we fix it? While the technology and processes for a successful BI implementation have nearly reached commodity levels (in other words, the hard stuff from a technology perspective has nearly been solved for) what impact does the user organization play in long term success? Can, and should we, rely on our Executive Sponsor (ES) for more than just financial support? How can we engage our ES to take their evangelism of the program beyond the board room? Is it their responsibility to help ensure that end-user adoption is meeting or exceeding expectations? Some organizations have aligned the ES’s bonus to the user adoption, have you?
As always there are some great conversations that happen at the Summit. During lunch one day we learned about Share It. An app used by the B-eye-Network, and others to allow consumers to easily share website content. We also had a long conversation about how companies measure ROI for BI Programs. Turns out many of them don’t. The measurement of value was discussed as an alternative and it seems to work relatively well for most companies. I would suspect that 2009 will be the year of the BI ROI.
Comments are closed.