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Quick Takes Week of June 1


June 5: Peter Thomas has a long and insightful post at SmartData Collective dealing with the failure of BI projects. The lion’s share of the piece deconstructs three statements about projects that don’t make it: “The business did not need or want better information,” “The business needed or wanted better information, initially supported the concept of BI delivering this, but their enthusiasm for this approach waned over time” and “The business needed or wanted better information, but didn’t think that BI offered the way to deliver this.” There is a lot more to the piece – all of it informative – but one statement by Thomas stands out: “I firmly believe that BI done well is both the easiest of IT systems to sell to people and has one of the highest paybacks of any IT initiative. BI done badly (at the design, development, implementation or follow-up stages) will fail.”

June 4: It’s nice to read a piece that describes how BI platforms are being used to improve education. InformationWeek describes how the schools in Columbus, Ohio are using WebFocus tools from Information Builders. The school system, working with personnel from Nationwide Mutual Insurance, are proactively analyzing student data to proactively spot problems, improve performance and raise graduation rates.

June 3: This very well done piece makes two assumptions: That the basic BI tools are in place and that the company’s strategy has stalled. SearchCIO.com Senior News Writer Christina Torode offers five steps to get things moving in the right direction: Work through a “proof of concept” exercise with a business group; don’t skimp on evangelization; cross-pollinate the IT and BI management teams; make sure that the questions being posed by the project are on the mark and make sure that initiatives are transparent.

June 2: Ann All has a post at IT Business Edge that focuses nicely on the importance of getting end users involved in BI initiatives. She quotes Scott Lowe, the CIO for Missouri’s Westminster College, who says that the CIO must be the “facilitator, enabler, and advisor in BI efforts.”

June 1: Don Campbell, the CTO for Business Intelligence and Performance Management at IBM, discusses the security ramifications of the movement of valuable BI data to mobile devices in this WirelessWeek piece. The keys, Campbell says, are to implement authentication, encryption and authorization tools and procedures, to use encryption and complex passwords to have a procedure in place to kill devices that are lost or stolen.

–Carl Weinschenk