When to Analyze Segments

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Ideally, the market segments should be identified early in the development process. As you will see in Chapter 4, market segments help you tailor deployment choices. Failure to agree on the target users or segment can quickly derail your project. As an example, a midsized maintenance supply company started out with a very clear scope: to enable senior marketing people to track monthly gross margin and sales by product, time, and region. They wanted a highly graphical tool with a dashboard. They selected a leading MOLAP and visualization tool, at the time a good decision for this user segment. At some point, field sellers voiced their information requirements. Field sellers needed a different level of detail than the senior marketing people, requiring daily sales figures down to the customer and order number. They didn't want graphics; they needed the detail numbers in a tabular report. Field sellers are a different user segment than senior marketing people, with different needs. Unfortunately, the scope of this project was not well managed. The project manager wanted to be responsive to all users and tried to cram a significant amount of detail into one big cube. Neither user segment was satisfied with the end product. Although the project had strong business sponsorship and was driven by business goals, it failed because the target user group was not well understood.

If the market segments had been clearly defined at the project scoping stage, the project manager would have recognized the diverse needs and could have either declared the requirements out of scope or more appropriately matched the solution with each user segment.

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