By Charles Moreira
While many businesses, organisations and government agencies have experienced the many benefits of business intelligence (BI) and business analytics (BA) solutions, convincing top management and colleagues to come on board is more easily said than done.
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| Arch Coal’s Jamie Oswald |
“While any BI project requires executive support, at the same time, they can just pick up the phone and ask those below them for the numbers, so have less incentive to embrace BI,” Jamie Oswald, senior business intelligence analyst with Arch Coal told the SAP BI 2012 conference at the Marina Bay Sands Convention Centre in Singapore on 16 October, 2012. “However, they will respond positively if given an iPad and then will feel the need.”
The St. Louis, Missouri-based Arch Coal is the second largest coal mining company by volume in the U.S. and fifth worldwide, which mines steam coal and metallurgical coal. The company installed a data warehousing system in 2008 and an SAP BusinessObjects system in 2009. Most of its BI is used to track inventory, for maintenance management and so on.
On the other hand, all data top executives need is provided by the lower ranks, who don’t want to give up all their secrets, so it’s important to make their work easy for them, since they fear being replaced.
Also different operational units have different requirements, so trust people and make them trust you, while being ans neutral as possible.
Arch Coal uses BI for its core reporting – i.e. operation reporting to top management and self-service which produces different kinds of reports as required.
“Usually start with core reporting based upon a framework and think ahead towards self service and about what questions users may ask in two years time,” said Oswald. “Look for subject areas with a small number of measures and clearly define hierarchies, such as safety for example.”
Human resources (HR) will generally be interested to collaborate with the project but its data is tricky, especially in terms of security and there’s little payback in HR but good payback in security.
Get it right
Bad data will kill the credibility of any BI initiative, even if it’s just a proof-of-concept or a test, so don’t trip up or it will be hard to convince colleagues again.
BI project managers need to get power users among their colleagues involved to guide their colleagues and listen to their complaints, without giving in to all their requests, which would be impractical. It’s important to keep training ongoing, provide manuals and have exercises still available and also produce some training videos.
However, not everyone needs weeks of training, so it’s best to leave it up to colleagues to request for it. It’s also important to create a network by forming a user group, to which the power users can make presentations and help. Also have one e-mail address for multiple reports.
Don’t kill the spreadsheet
“Many BI professionals have tried to kill the spreadsheet as a BI tool but failed, so make spreadsheets better instead,” said Oswald. Many staff like spreadsheets like Microsoft Excel for its flexibility and it lets them do anything with it, including to easily change the numbers in case of errors.
Arch Coal’s next steps in BI are to create more dashboards, implement Business Intelligence 4.0, increase explorer use and to dig deeper into mobile BI.
