Preface

Many organizations are already well equipped to implement successful business intelligence (BI) decision-support applications, such as data warehouses, data marts, and other business analytics applications. However, during our consulting and teaching engagements, we have encountered many ill-equipped organizations as well. We observed some common factors among them, which we address in this book:

• Lack of understanding of the complexity of BI decision-support projects

• Lack of recognizing BI decision-support projects as cross-organizational business initiatives and not understanding that cross-organizational initiatives are different from stand-alone solutions

• Unavailable or unwilling business representatives

• Unengaged business sponsors or business sponsors who have little or no authority due to their low-level positions within the organization

• Lack of skilled and available staff as well as suboptimum staff utilization

• Inappropriate project team structure and dynamics

• No software release concept (no iterative development method)

• No work breakdown structure (no methodology)

• Ineffective project management (only project administration)

• No business analysis and no standardization activities

• No appreciation of the impact of dirty data on business profitability

• No understanding of the necessity for and the usage of meta data

• Too much reliance on disparate methods and tools (the "silver bullet" syndrome)

BI project managers and project teams can use this book to improve their project life cycles. They can also use it to obtain the appropriate recognition for their BI projects from the business community and to solicit the required support from their executive management. BI project team members and the business representatives assigned to them can use this book to gain a better understanding of the development effort required to build and deploy successful BI decision-support applications.