Others Who Affect Implementation Efforts

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In addition to your target BusinessObjects users (either primary or secondary), you need to be aware of gatekeepers, influencers, and deciders (Figure 3-1). These people may or may not be eventual BusinessObjects users, but they do affect project funding and your implementation efforts. For each type of stakeholder, I have provided an archetype. The individual job titles and dynamics will vary company to company. The important thing is to recognize that it is more than just the users that affect the success of your implementation and whose needs you must consider.

Figure 3-1: Many people besides direct users affect the success of a BusinessObjects implementation.

Gatekeepers

Gatekeepers control access to potential data sources, existing reports, or the users themselves. Gatekeepers can either help your implementation be a wild success or sabotage your efforts. Let's assume you want to use BusinessObjects to access a central data warehouse. IT had a vision of the central data warehouse being used to populate dependent data marts. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, lack of understanding, and political issues, your individual business unit or function never built a dependent data mart. The central data warehouse owner/project manager is a gatekeeper. The gatekeeper will either grant you ad hoc access, knowing you will only complain about the lousy response time (that's why they wanted you to sponsor a data mart!) or do everything to impede the BusinessObjects implementation. Thus, the infighting begins. Ideally, the two stakeholders work together to:

• Implement BusinessObjects in a controlled way.

• Understand usage to educate users/sponsors on the value of BI.

• Analyze access patterns and problems to fund and develop the dependent data mart.

The administrative assistant discussed in the preceding major section in connection with primary versus secondary status can also be a gatekeeper. As the BusinessObjects expert, you want to better understand the information flow and business value of the reports the assistant schedules on a regular basis. A conversation with the VP of Marketing would be invaluable. The assistant sees no need for such a meeting (nor does the VP of Marketing, since the VP has never even heard of BusinessObjects), as the assistant can tell you everything you want to know about how the department uses the tool anyway. At this point, you can rely exclusively on the feedback the assistant gives you, or you can ask the assistant for help by having a joint conversation with both the primary and secondary users. To make the BusinessObjects implementation more successful:

• Understand what the gatekeepers want.

• Recognize their efforts and role in the business intelligence process; look for ways to involve them or make them part of the implementation team.

• Identify the mutually exclusive goals.

• Identify the common goals.

• Build allegiances with the gatekeepers so that they work with you, not against you.

Influencers

Influencers are another set of people that affect how well your implementation proceeds. Influencers provide input to your users about how good the product is, whether it will really be useful, and how it is being deployed. The influencers often have some role in an existing reporting process and may have a vested interest in keeping the old reporting process running. They may be source system report programmers, source system experts (why do we need a data warehouse, anyway?), business analysts who have developed departmental databases, and power users. Positive influencers expedite your implementation and provide a lot of positive word-of-mouth promotion. ERP vendors that embed BusinessObjects are positive influencers, as are satisfied BusinessObjects users that were perhaps pilot users during development.

Unfortunately, you may encounter a degree of job protection or 'not invented here' syndrome with negative influencers. These are the hurdles to overcome. If a business analyst has spent an inordinate amount of time creating queries to populate departmental databases and spreadsheets, then BusinessObjects will be perceived as a threat. It renders their data sources obsolete. Negative influencers may slow your implementation by seeding your new users with doubt, saying 'Look how slow it is! The data is wrong!' For this reason, you need influencers on your side. If they know the data requirements, then get them to have a stake in BusinessObjects' success. While they may be proud of the departmental system they created, they will know too well the manual processes and reconciliation time they go through to keep the data current and accurate. If they cannot be directly part of the project team, ensure they are a focal point for implementation or a designated BusinessObjects expert.

Many companies have more than one BI tool; perhaps because individual departments proceeded with their own initiatives, business units were acquired, or ERP vendors offered an integrated BI tool. Of all the applications IT must deliver, BI standardization is the most contentious (next to spreadsheets, that is). If you are charged with reducing the number of different BI tools and converting users to the corporate standard of BusinessObjects, then the competing BI tool experts will be powerful influencers. They will be the first to spot how their tool is better and argue for standardizing on their BI tool. In some cases, competing BI tools may have better functionality in specific areas, so give them credit and save your breath. If you have followed an objective selection process, explain how the standard was selected, where BusinessObjects is stronger, and why it is a better fit for an enterprise-wide deployment (refer to Chapter 1 for some strategic reasons). You may have to do this multiple times before you gain acceptance. If the decision to implement BusinessObjects as a corporate standard was autocratic, blame the decision maker and march onward. The bottom line is that the measure of success is not who agrees with the decision, but rather, that the standard is adopted and how well you use BusinessObjects to achieve a measurable benefit.

Deciders

Deciders are the final decision makers. A decider may be a project sponsor or an end user or both. Deciders are in a position of authority and can cast the final vote on funding the project, establishing an implementation strategy, or approving the initial set of BusinessObjects tools. In the preceding examples, the decider could be

• The CIO who overrules the central data warehouse project manager and allows individual business units to proceed with a BusinessObjects implementation, regardless of the existence of a dependent data mart

• The VP of Marketing who requires all marketing staff to at least be report readers who log into InfoView portal to retrieve their own reports, while the administrative assistant is empowered as a report author

• The CFO who commits to phasing out the departmental spreadsheets/databases after an agreed-upon period of running BusinessObjects reports in parallel

Pre-business intelligence, I focused on work group computing tools. A new business unit VP was looking to improve productivity and computer literacy. In the late 1980s, this was the first time some people had ever seen a PC. Managers would scribble messages onto pieces of paper that secretaries typed and sent as e-mails. The secretaries printed incoming e-mails and manually distributed them. The new VP instructed managers to do their own e-mails and forbade the secretaries to type or print them any more. His mandate certainly expedited my implementation schedule! People were dismayed and aggravated. He was a decider. After everyone got over the shock of this radical change, productivity and computer literacy improved, and this same business unit eventually became an early adopter of business intelligence tools. I'd like to think that the Internet has drastically boosted everyone's enthusiasm for BI tools and direct access to information, but in those unusual cases where users, gatekeepers, and influencers are resistant to BusinessObjects, it helps to have a strong decider in your corner.

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