Risks of Not Performing Step 5

Business managers, IT managers, and IT technicians often do not want to take the time to perform rigorous data analysis, which involves logical data modeling, source data archeology, and data cleansing. They see those activities as a waste of time. They judge the success of a BI project by the speed with which it gets delivered, rather than by the quality of its deliverable . As a result, organizations often create stovepipe data marts and populate them "suck and plunk" style with the same data they have on the source files and source databases, thereby copying all the existing data impairments to the new BI decision-support environment. Instead of eliminating their existing data problems, they just compounded them ”now there are additional redundant and inconsistent BI target databases and applications to maintain.

Of all the 16 steps presented in Business Intelligence Roadmap , Step 5, Data Analysis, is the most critical cross-organizational step. This step is a major differentiator between a traditional systems development approach and a cross-organizational development approach. The activities of business-focused data analysis force the information consumers and the data owners to reconstruct a cross-organizational view and to clean up their expensive data chaos, not only in the BI decision-support environment but in their operational systems as well. These are all prerequisites for improving the business executives' abilities to make decisions. Without this step, you are just building another traditional stovepipe decision-support system, not a BI solution.