Implementing a technical solution to support your Balanced Scorecard (BSC) or Business Intelligence (BI) system can have major benefits for your business, but without the right knowledge, planning and Business Intelligence tools, you could be on the fast track to your own version of corporate limbo - so close to the BSC ‘heaven' you desired, yet so far away. In this blog I will attempt to describe some of the major traps - or sins - and propose ways to avoid them with help from Microsoft's BI toolset.
Despite the promises of software companies that their tools will provide your managers unparalleled insight into the ever-increasing amount of data held within your business systems, the tools themselves have no intelligence or business acumen, no matter how large or impressive their range of outputs. What makes the difference between the success and failure of a BSC and BI technology implementation is the planning and hard work put in during the establishment phase, having the right technology, realistic expectations, and educating staff on the use of the powerful new tools that will be available to them.
Gluttony: Too much data, too much choice..
Manigent has identified Seven Deadly Sins associated with BSC implementations. Avoid them at your peril.
- Gluttony - Stuffing your dashboard full of every KPI, chart and list of data you can find and gorging on all the business data without regard to quality and value of information..
- Sloth - Expecting the BI tools to do all the data preparation as quickly as the data visualisations and ignoring the time and effort needed for the background work of data preparation and automation (extract, transform and load or ETL to the techy guys)
- Lust - Rushing to use the BI tools for short-term gain with minimal training, instead of taking time to learn best practice and understand the long-term implications of BSC implementation design.
- Pride - Believing BI tools will allow you to do everything yourself, instead of identifying the variety of skills required and then including the use of experts, where necessary, in the project delivery.
- Anger - A common sin with clients who resist changes to their established procedures, then expect the new solution to do exactly the same as their old stuff, or try to force the new product do things it was not designed to do.
- Envy - Becoming distracted by added functionality in later versions or new technology as the project progresses and so losing sight of the intended system benefits.
- Greed - Wanting it all, without compromise. Insisting on achieving 100% of the project scope from day one, for the same cost and in the initially agreed time frames.
So we will look at each of the seven sins in detail and provide advice on how to avoid their temptation, leading you on the path to BI enlightenment and BSC implementation project success.
