The Five Barriers to Business Intelligence

One from the Archives (Circa 2006)

Any executive will tell you that gaining real time access to their corporate intelligence is very difficult. If not impossible.

There are 5 key barriers for any organisation seeking to capitalise on the latent strategic value buried deep within their enterprise wide data.

 The first barrier is simply the amount of data stored in the corporate information systems.

 The more you have the less likely you are to find what you are looking for when you want it urgently. Plus the more data you try to gather, clean and store the more expensive the Business Intelligence system becomes. 

Data Quantity

The second barrier is Data Quality

Toxic data is a problem across any organization and the total cost of the De-Tox cycle of washing, cleaning and improving the overall quality and usability of the data is normally prohibitive.

Data Quality

The third barrier is the proliferation of IT systems and technologies the organization employs to manage its corporate knowledge.

 Integrating a diverse set of complex IT systems to obtain an integrated global view of the business is very difficult. This is why most large organizations minimise their Strategic Business Intelligence initiatives to small scale expert teams who specialise in the use of OLAP Data Mining tools.

Fragmentation of the corporate intelligence occurs when the business stakeholders take ownership of the problem at a localized level and spreadsheet based management reporting proliferate throughout the organization.

Technology Barriers

The fourth barrier is the organizational structure.

 Complex workflows are inefficient, lead to knowledge “gate keeping” and are a barrier to any organization becoming an intelligent business

 It is also important that a correlation exists between the organizational work practices and how these workflows integrate with the corporate information systems. Intelligent Businesses emerge when their IT systems are closely correlated to the organisation’s workflow practices. If the relationships between people and departments are not mirrored by the technology then the chances of the organization operating to its potential are greatly diminished.

Organisational and Workflow Barriers

The final barrier is corporate culture.

 Business Intelligence is a key currency within any organization. It is what is traded between departmental “gate keepers” in their daily negotiations with the rest of the business.

 The concept of putting another expensive IT layer onto of the existing corporate Knowledge Network is essentially redundant unless the corporation invests in a strategy to migrate the existing “gateway culture” to an Intelligent Business that supports a 360 Degree collaborative knowledge culture.

 Organisations are already proficient at collaborative knowledge management or they are not. What technology you choose to streamline this process this is largely redundant if the culture and the business processes do not already exist to facilitate knowledge sharing.

Cultural Barriers

Don’t confuse Business Intelligence with Innovation >>

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