The Journey Toward BI Self-Sufficiency

Information Management Magazine, November 2007

Bill Collins

Organizations beginning business intelligence (BI) initiatives often turn to external BI consultants for assistance. It is common for these organizations to include among their objectives self-sufficiency with BI. In other words, they are willing to pay for expert external assistance to get started, but they want - at some point in the future - to be able to design, build, operate and use BI applications on their own, without external assistance. This objective typically is expressed to the external consultant as a request for knowledge transfer to be included in the consulting engagement. My BI consulting firm has helped numerous clients on their journey toward BI self-sufficiency. These clients have achieved varying levels of success, largely due to key decisions they made along the way. This article discusses the elements of BI knowledge transfer that are critical to achieving self-sufficiency.

Knowledge Transfer to Whom?

It would seem obvious that, in order to become self-sufficient in BI, an organization must have a BI team capable of performing those tasks. This internal BI team is the intended recipient of the requested knowledge transfer. The money the organization is spending with the external BI consultant is in part an investment in developing its internal BI team.

Sometimes clients forget that there must be internal people - a BI team - to whom they must transfer the knowledge. If an organization uses external assistance primarily because it doesn’t have the staff to do the work, then it probably doesn’t have the staff to receive the BI knowledge transfer from the external consultant.

Talent Matters

The success of knowledge transfer depends a great deal upon the staff the client has identified to become its internal BI experts. The consultant staff transfers its knowledge to these people.

Many organizations undermine their own self-sufficiency efforts by underinvesting in their BI team. Some common mistakes are:

• Not recognizing the breadth and level of skill that are required. Because the objective of BI is to provide information that enables better business decision-making, the people building BI solutions must be closer to the business than builders of transaction-processing systems. All but the most technical roles on the BI team require a solid understanding of the organization’s business.
• BI is a specialized branch of IT. BI team members must have general IT skills, but that’s not enough. Many aspects of BI design and development differ significantly from the methods used to develop transaction-processing systems. These specialized aspects of BI constitute much of the knowledge transfer the client needs transferred to its staff. The required BI expertise can be gained through education, training and knowledge transfer. However, business understanding and fundamental IT skills are prerequisites.
• Not paying market compensation. The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) publishes an annual survey of BI salaries, roles and responsibilities that can be useful in calibrating the compensation of BI team members. Although both data warehousing and BI are mature disciplines, there is a shortage of top-notch experienced BI professionals relative to the demand for such people. Organizations should expect to get the level of BI talent for which they are willing to pay.
• Filling the team with low performers. Those clients least successful in achieving BI self-sufficiency have been those that staffed their BI teams with people who performed poorly in other positions. Talent matters: the best-performing BI teams have the cream of the crop, not the bottom of the barrel.
• Team members must want to learn. The decision to invest in knowledge transfer for BI self-sufficiency is one made by the client organization’s management. Management also decides which employees will be on its BI team. Because it made these decisions, management is committed to having BI knowledge transferred to the BI team members. The team members themselves also must want to gain BI knowledge, and that is not always the case for all team members. One of management’s responsibilities is to generate enthusiasm for the BI initiative and the use of expert external assistance so that the team members are engaged in the knowledge transfer process. There is no substitute for eager and willing recipients.

It Takes Time

The majority of knowledge transfer takes place during the project as the work is being done. In the simplest case, the consultants explain what they are doing, while they are doing it. Not surprisingly, explaining while doing (and the learning dialog that accompanies it) takes more time than simply doing. A very rough rule of thumb is that knowledge transfer adds 25 to 50 percent to the elapsed time of a BI project. This additional elapsed time, and the cost associated with it, is the organization’s investment in achieving BI self-sufficiency. The business situation sometimes forces a BI project to have an aggressive schedule or a fixed completion deadline. Because knowledge transfer takes extra time, such projects should not also be burdened with knowledge transfer. Instead, they should be “just do it” projects.

Once is Not Enough

Attaining BI self-sufficiency is a journey. Each project in the organization’s BI program is one step on that journey. The number of steps required to reach BI self-sufficiency depends on many factors: the amount of BI expertise and experience the organization has at the start, the emphasis placed on knowledge transfer, the complexity of the IT environment and so on. Organizations new to BI sometimes expect to be self-sufficient by their second project. That is, the consultant helps them with their first BI project, and then they do the second and subsequent projects by themselves. Such expectations are seldom realistic.

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