In the rich canvas of the BI, there are many facets - technological, business value creation and execution aspects that come to fore. TDWI (The Data Warehousing Institute) India Chapter explores this canvas. This event focuses on various areas related to BI: Real-time, Agile, Operational, Cloud and other latest trends in BI. There will be sessions by CIOs and practitioners, experts who will deliberate the initiation and adoption strategies as well as explore the architecture for building global Business Analytics infrastructure from multinational businesses.

Armed with techno-business perspective, our panel of thought-leaders and practitioners, explores best practices for enhancing business capability and maximize the value of BI. They will discuss BI and Business Alignment – Challenges and opportunities, How is value created or measured, How is value created or measured, How to create new capabilities to help drive business performance and share the biggest lessons they have learned.

BI implementations fail because they are sold to the IT departments and not to the business users. The use case and ROI needs to be built with the business users. If that is not done, it results in high probability of self-ware, lack of ROI for the business user and a pure IT project not driven by the needs of the business

The Importance of Time To Value And ROI - With the economic volatility and investment decision and justification process that many organizations have in place today, BI practitioners are strongly focused on the time to value dimension of ROI. They need to not only realize a positive return, but also show that return quickly. ROI = Financial Business Benefits – TCO

Conclusion: 'Without the Business in Business Intelligence, BI is dead!': In today’s volatile economy, organizations have been increasingly focused on tactical, quick-win technology projects at the expense of large strategic projects. The impact of technology projects on the top and bottom line of the organization is increasingly under scrutiny. The purpose of ROI is to provide a financial metric with which to measure such projects and provide a like-for-like comparison between initiatives that may have very different justifications and business benefits.

Let’s assume the literal definition of ROI is 'the financial results (impact, sales, revenue) generated by an investment of time, money and resources into a specific set of actions.' It is easier for us to measure “activities” such as number of Reports, cubes developed, number of BI users, number of hours saved in delivering reports, BI tool usage; etc. And while, value can be shown easily using a product which can consume and spit out dashboards as easily as making scrambled eggs in the morning, one has to wonder how much value it provides over time when the data to support such dashboards often still requires much manual intervention, ie. acquisition from source systems, cleansing, transformation and loading into a consumable format. Where’s the ROI in that? Most systems boast on the time savings achieved with implementation when calculating a BI system’s ROI.

Measuring ROI starts back with your overall strategy: Why are you doing what you are doing? Who are you trying to influence and what do you want them to do? Goals of the BI project / initiative have to be defined prior to start, based on which the ROI can than be measured and calculated. Some ROI determining factors include: Cost savings – as mentioned above and may include hardware/software, licensing, maintenance fees, etc., Time savings – employee production and better decision making, Process automation – includes the time saved on report/analytics creation. These are quantifiable ways of identifying the value of BI and the ROI attained through BI adoption. However, other aspects such as enhanced productivity, information visibility, and increased profitability are more difficult to ascertain. For instance, marketers are constantly trying to identify the success of their marketing campaigns. This may include defining the correlation between individual campaigns and lead generation or online marketing activities or advertisements and an increase in sales. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to identify where opportunities are generated and the correlations that exist between marketing initiatives and sales. The same difficulty exists in identifying ROI for BI. The quantitative aspects may be easy to define, but the qualitative factors that make BI beneficial to organizations is said to be elusive by many. Even ROI calculations developed by industry experts and solution providers tend to lack the evidence to prove BI’s value conclusively beyond time savings and general process automation.

BI: Best Practices for the real ROI - questions for the Panel

• Uncertainties about how to get started – Again, in part to the pseudo-mystique surrounding the world of "business intelligence," many executives and managers do not feel that they "have what it takes" to get started benefiting from understanding their customers and marketplace better by leveraging the data they have been collecting in their ERP systems for years. There are simple ways to get started and one can always make the leap to more sophisticated business intelligence applications when conditions warrant. How can one start small and then scale up?
• Don’t Make Statements. Ask Questions: Practice of asking questions FIRST and making statements later on ROI for BI projects is a best practice. For e.g. 'What value did you get with that information?' Please help us with, what questions needs to be asked on ROI for BI projects.
• 'We have a problem with ROI' Tell the truth, even if it hurts. Your customers will find out sooner or later, make it sooner rather than later. Be honest and avoid corporate spin. Most “good customers” can handle truth. Your views onto this.
• BI project ROI is a ongoing and evolving process at what period or juncture we should measure the ROI or what should be the periodicity of measuring ROI with any BI project.
• ROI calculations are difficult. Are they always necessary? We should start worrying about ‘ROI’ and just start BI projects. What’s the ROI of putting pants on in the morning? What do you think?
• 'Greed is Good.” Explain the tangible and intangible benefits you get from BI projects. First the hard benefits and then help us with the soft benefits.
• 'Did it costs a lot of money for BI project to look this cheap?' Do you believe that there are many cases when BI is too expensive relative to benefits?
• 'BI project is like a crystal gazing', you never know what you’re gonna get. Is Priotizing BI requests based on ROI is the key to ensure maximize your potential value and provide the best return on investment?
• 'What we’ve got here is ROI to communicate'. Lack of clear communication is the greatest crime against customers a BI project leader can commit. Communication is about dialogue, not the old fashioned IT monologue that did not allow for customer feedback. Your views on importance of communication on ROI to customers.
• It’s better to spread that investment over a broader number of users, raising the ROI for each user. Focusing only on analytical users is expensive and wasteful. Do you agree that most BI initiatives fail because organizations make large investments to equip a small number of back office analysts with BI capabilities?