Business Value Intelligence

BVA Intelligence

The 2009 Gartner BI summit has come and gone. Global CIO’s have returned to their respective countries with their pressing daily priorities. Oracle world and Sapphire launched new products and applications but the pressing priorities still remain unanswered.

What ever do we do with declining business user satisfaction?

Gartner reported in Feb 2009 that despite huge investments companies are not attaining business expectations. While on the street Oracle customers are moving to SAP BW, SAP BW customers are moving to Teradata or SQL and SQL customers are moving to Oracle or BW.

Does the problem of BVA, Business Value Attainment, lie with technology, i.e. will changing the technology platform alter BVA or is the real issue something else.

With 2010 now upon us and the next Gartner BI conference just on our doorsteps, are we going to hear the same or find some solutions. Will 2010 Sapphire, ASUG and BITI conferences tell us how to maximize returns or sell more appliances? Will Oracle world decrease our probability of wastage or introduce us to newer applications and processes.

Consumers are not only not achieving BVA, but thinking a lot about it right now. So how do businesses get BVA intelligence?

Quite a few BI managers are being asked to cut costs and provide higher services at the same time. Others are loosing business sponsors and support. Projects are expecting their lowest cost resources to wear not one, or two but three hats, and they are receiving too many applicants that feel they fit that role. Still other companies are off-shoring their full BI applications hoping that what they could not solve 100 feet away will magically get resolved with the lowest cost solution 10,000 miles away.

The rest of the world is watching
While BI costs have been escalating, BVA satisfaction rates have been declining, on the last count possibility for failure was at 40 to 48%. Is the reality still worse than this.
Last I talked to a newly appointed CIO, from 4 months ago, she mentioned ‘What a mess. I don’t even know where to begin’
Eliminate ‘heads I win, tails I take your money and go away’ BI projects
An BVA intelligent process can measure BVA from before the BI project starts and provide BVA updates on a weekly basis to the steering committee and all business owners. If there are surprises 4 weeks after the BI project go-live is it the fault of technology, steering committee, hardware, software, implementation partner, the process or the project manager. I can tell you from over 25,000 hrs of BI experience it is none of the above. Each one of them did their job and did it well, so where is the Missing Link. You can request for my white paper that identifies this missing link and my upcoming book that will define the roadmap to finish bad BI’s once and for all.
By bringing BVA information together in one place and providing BI checklists with BVA capabilities – trending graphs, dashboards, near real-time monitors, exception alerts, location-comparison reports and detailed analysis capabilities – an intelligent enterprise can reverse current trends and improve ‘BI’s gone bad’
Gartner has predicted that by 2018, 82% of healthcare IT spend will be in Business Intelligence. If this is any indication of the future companies better make sure every dollar spent is towards the concept of ‘Do it right the first time’
With increasing BI demand we shall see more and more companies creating a profitability path and sustainability leadership in business intelligence. Big and small vendors along with corporate aligned vendors will step up and provide new solutions.
But CxO and business need to be able to differentiate between what will work and what will not.
The synergy between BI and BVA are many. The check point’s simple if understood. But there is a clear roadmap for assuring business success without having to try and reinvent the wheel.
Hopefully we will agree and improve on the basic concepts, and not get led astray be groups that have an agenda of their own.


My advice is the ‘blink’ test. If you feel comfortable and are willing to stake you job with the fundamentals of the offering, and its gives you a ‘warm and fuzzy’ feeling based on your own vertical experience then review it with an independent value owner. If not… well that’s an entirely different story.