Guerilla BI

The organization I work for is strongly influenced by new house sales, and as such, has been cautiously and deliberately considering every expenditure and new initiative for more than the past year.  It might be hard to remember given the more recent financial institution meltdowns around the world, but prior to all that, the US had started a housing slump caused by "subprime" mortgages.  It was definitely a precipitating event to the current credit crunch, but all by itself, it was a serious problem for any company that dealt with real estate or residential construction in the US.

I have had it drilled in to me by reading articles and whitepapers, attending seminars and courses - the most significant predictor of whether a Business Intelligence project will succeed or fail is the existence of a "powerful" sponsor.  "Powerful" in the sense of being significantly high up in your organizational hierarchy, having substantial influence over those at the same level or higher, and having the drive and vision of changing the culture of the organization to make decisions in a fact-based way.  If you don't have such a sponsor, you may be agile enough or deceptive enough to be able to avoid budget scrutiny and build your BI system.  But ultimately, even with a fully operational Dashboard or Scorecard, your vision will essentially be doomed if the culture of your organization isn't compatible with embracing fact-based decision making.

I for one am close to this position at the moment.  There is definitely an appetite for information (not just data) in order to support decisions and strategy - it's just that the climate has put a cloud of darkness over any sentence that includes the words "new" and "project".  As such, I can't really go pushing for my sponsor to enlist support... but I can continue to find ways to deliver current information more efficiently, and make our business more productive.

We currently have a "Dashboard" - I put that in quotations because it's fairly rudimentary, and only loosely fits what I'd define a dashboard to be.  For one, it's implemented in MS Access... and that's probably about as much an explanation as is required.  There are several "challenges" (the nice word for "problems") that a true data warehouse and analytics presentation system would solve - so that's where my development effort is going.  My plan is to build a comprehensive framework along the way, so that I can shift my focus from "extending" the current Dashboard to replacing it completely, and/or providing some other interface(s) to the data warehouse.

I'm going to call this tactic "Guerilla BI" - and I'll let you know if it works out.