I once had a BI project and after reading Kimball book, here that I can take note :

1. This project is driven by their IT division 

The project has started from the situation that IT had made some major investment on Data Warehouse. They didn’t have any clear vision about what actually the user, or, the BUSINESS need from a Business Intelligence initiatives. Quoting from Kimball, Technology is important, business value is MANDATORY. So we shouldn’t start extracting data unless we know how the data will be used.

2. We didn’t have strong sponshoship

I like this criteria from kimball for “strong sponsorship” :

a) Visionary: Someone who has a sense for the value and potential of information and some clear, specific ideas on
how to apply it.

b) Resourceful: Someone who is able to obtain the necessary resources and facilitate the organizational change the data warehouse will bring about.

c) Reasonable: Someone who can temper his or her enthusiasm with the understanding that it takes time and resources to build a major information system.

Unfortunately we didn’t have it. The main consequence was that this project became second to bottom priority for this company, they didn’t have any vision what they could take advantages of, and maybe when they realized this, that will be too late because as I already knew, the other companies from the same industries, even in Indonesia, have sufficient strategy for Business Intelligence and its additional value for their business.

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Yes the main problems that we often face in BI projects especially in Indonesia is client maturity. They still expect that BI is just a Reporting Tool. What they need to think is how they use it to drive their business process or add business value. And we don’t yet talk about Analytics ….