Achieving business intelligence success through stakeholder engagement

For a company to succeed with its business intelligence project, stakeholder engagement from start to finish is essential. By engaging in continuous communication with various people at different levels, you can make sure the project lives up to every stakeholder’s requirements and addresses data gaps from the outset.Then people have access to the data they need and can act on it.

A new business intelligence initiative or project requires considerable effort to plan and implement successfully. One of the keys to success is ensuring that stakeholders across the business are involved from start to finish.

One Gartner global report noted that a lack of business support and training was a common culprit in the failure of BI projects. No matter how much information you create, failing to communicate with team members and enact actionable response mechanisms will render your data ineffectual.

Success requires the involvement of all team members from the executive sponsor responsible for the strategic direction and ongoing integration to the sales representative that will benefit from better access into quality customer data.

Among the most common reasons for BI project failure is a lack of communication with a range of stakeholders.

BI initiatives fail because company executives and non-managerial subject-matter experts were not engaged during the entire process. Business intelligence benefits the entire organization. Data is an important business asset and better data will lead to better decision-making. This concept is not exclusive to the executive team or even business managers. Empowering all stakeholders with access to data and the ability to use the data to help them with their business roles will prove beneficial across the enterprise.

It’s important to demonstrate how analytics can benefit decision-making by providing a clear and comprehensive picture of key performance indicators. Everyone from the top down should be able to access the information and reporting capabilities they need to be successful.

Not everyone will be easily convinced that business intelligence is the right initiative.

Even though the pandemic has made working from home the norm and the need to access a single source of data from anywhere the key to a dispersed workforce, there will still be internal skeptics. They may even be part of the executive team who are critical decision makers and cultural influencers. It’s important to identify who the naysayers are and then communicate to them early and often the clear business objectives and value of advanced analytics to the company. Having their support could have a dramatic influence on others within the organization who may share their concerns. When it comes to BI, stakeholders want to know what’s in it for them, as well as the organization.

“The first element in any analytics business case is to focus on describing a positive vision that connects both emotionally and rationally to the stakeholder’s aspirations, ideally developed collaboratively by business and technology stakeholders.

Alan D. Duncan, Gartner analyst

This means that leaders must present positive outcomes that benefit both individual stakeholders and the organization as a whole.”

A successful BI deployment begins by identifying and engaging all stakeholders. They hold the knowledge for their particular areas of the business. They need to be engaged at some level in the planning and deployment and given the opportunity to identify their objectives. While not every departmental, divisional or regional objective will make it in the final project scope, it's critical to stakeholder engagement in the final solution that their voices are heard and ideas considered.

Phocas has successfully implemented over 1500 business Intelligence projects both large and small and we follow our tried and tested 8 step approach.