Contractual BI Delimmas: Quantity or Quality?

In all my years of deploying one type of Data warehouse or the other this has to be the most difficult scenarios for most BI Stakeholders and contract signatories. If one simply asks the question to an executive they look at you as if you are a worm that has just crawled out from under a stone’ Quality of course’ is the prompt reply.

However, when we look at the global contracts it seems that quantity seems to triumph over quality at a very consistent frequency. The executive delima is 300 reports vs 6 in a 6 month new BI project. Executives seem to prefer the numbers game so for ‘X’ amount of budget the questin becomes whetehrt to [1]  go after high numbers assuming with certainly that there will be more than 6 reports that will meet business needs or, [2]  go for 6 reports with a plan to meet 85% user satisfaction.

While you disagree remember the Gartner reports that over 50% of BI initiatives do not meet business expectations.

From my side I am a believer of both but with an 80:20 rule. 80% of the focus on quality and 20% on quantity. However, from a strategic, budgetary and user experience point of view it is better to deliver 6 reports that meet user expectations in the upper 90 percentile than deliver 300 reports, with 20 reports meeting 30% and 10 reports meeting 50% of user expectations, and 270 reports just plaing the numbers game. This may seem rather absurd however it your ran a Query BVA check the numbers may be closer to this truth that most of us would like to believe. Also,I can tell you straight off the bat that the second scenario will create a fire of dissatisfaction and we all know that fires spread very very fast and are mostly unpredictably wild.

From an executive perspective in particular, your goal (or should I call it , Your Solution), isnt about deploying a technology and then handing it to business that actually footed the bill. It’s all about providing strategic business value to your company and your information consumers. Leaders in management process consistently state that most proactive executives should be able to run their operations with 6 to 8 reports. Lets extend that by a factor of 50% and say 12 reports. So from a Sales point of view 4 informatic dashboards for the executives, 6-8 analytics for management and 8-12 reports for the sales folks should be an excellent starting point. Rather than delivring 300 sales reports and your foot solders findng out there is not a single report they can use for their data to day business transactions.

Can you do this with your current technicratic methodologies – probably not. Can you do it at all – the answer is yes. The solutions is to focus on busness and their needs and make them a partner in all your solutuions, architcture and designs. With a 4-6 hour training all of them can more than control all they need to know. Fine tune the solution with a business focus and then explore what BI success brings to the table.

Does this require major changes – absolutely not. Just a change in your sails and a small realignments of yoru BI project process and its happy sailing thereafter.

As always, I’d love to hear what you think!

Tips & Tricks for HANA Part 1 of 4

Fidn this in SAP's Experience HANA site
https://www.experiencesaphana.com/community/blogs/blog/2012/03/29/tips-tricks-for-a-new-hana-implementation

7 Habits of True Strategic BI Thinkers

The biggest fault of BI managers is when they start to develop day to day solutions and forget management. Here’s how to become a BI Strategy thinker and become the leader your company so desperately needs right now
In the beginning you wrote a lot of transformation codes, then you starting leading BI projects where you managed other coders. Before long you became the local and then the local lead. You burned the midnight oil and then through weekends. Then suddenly you became the global Information Manager or better still the CIO. Now it is time to change your hat, to stop looking at the trees, leave aside clipping leaves even though the tendency to prove your skill passes your table on almost a daily basis. Now the biggest mistake you can make is to stop managing or become tactical. It is now time to be strategic but first you have to understand what strategic means.

There is a part of your that does not allow you to think strategic because all the folks you had met selling strategy were quite irrelevant and basically to your mindset a bunch of ‘high flung dung’ types who basically were slackers. If these thoughts cross your mind it may be consoling to know you are not alone. So far your skills have been honed to deal with what lies right in front of you, i.e. dealing with what seems urgent and critical right now, often with an illusion that unless your solve it right now the world around will fall apart. While you are busy stepping around Severity 1 potholes, you’ll be flying past bonanza opportunities, and little time to look out through the long term windshield and miss all the signals that you’re on the road leading towards a very vertical cliff.  The temptation will remain extremely strong but by following your instincts you put your company and yourself at great risk.

Make no mistake, managing large BI projects is a very tough job, about that and there is an inherent failure probability of over 50%. If they are global BI projects then the stakes and complexities get ever higher.

One of the main reasons this job is so tough is that no one really understands what it takes. If you go and pick a book on business intelligence it will probably deal with how to build a cube or the EDW architecture, and be out of date by the time you start to read it. First thing is that it is hard to be a strategic BI leader if you don’t know what strategic BI leaders are supposed to do. Secondly its had to be strategic if you don’t know what your strategic checklist if for global business intelligence endeavors.

After two decades of assisting, both large and small, global corporations with their data warehouse initiatives, ranging from Oracle to Informix, SAP BW, BusinessObjects, BW Accelerator, HANA and Teradata,  my colleagues and I have come up with what’s required for such a role. Proactive strategic leaders – the kinds who thrive in today’s flat world and globally competitive environments – do seven things well:

1.    Business First

Most of the current BI initiatives treat BI as a technology deployment with BI initiatives planned architectured, modeled and delivered by IT folks. These leaders lack “Competitive Business Vision” and often deliver a technical solution with very little business context.  This can leave your company with a BI initiative that resonates with the following statement made recently by a CIO “Our BI initiative was an IT success, but a business failure”. According to Gartner more than 50% of BI projects end in this predicament. This can leave your company not only facing a severe drought of decision capable information for their day-to-day activities, but also leave your company vulnerable to the global competitive forces that thrive in detecting and acting on your confusing business signals. A strategic leader must encourage open dialogues between business and their team, build trust and engage critical stakeholders in all phases of the BI project.  To deliver a strategic IDCM, Information Demand & Consumption Management, environment you must:

a)     Align all BI goals to business goals and check each tactical request against the strategic goals

b)     Plan to leverage your business skills and enable Reports & Analytics that are one step ahead of your competition. Look for game changing ways to enhance decisions

c)      Find a BI Business Value Architect as your mentor to assist and guide you through the myriads of technology and BI alternatives. Conduct an alternative analysis before deploying any technology

d)     Network to build your personal ‘customers only’ circle of trust and then network a little more

2.    Strategic Foundation

“Conventional wisdom” opens you to a future where you’re BVA, Business Value Attainment, score languishes below a 50% success scenario. BVA is an acid test in BI that allows management to measure true business success of a BI installation at any phase of the project. But if you swallow all some of your current technocratic and tactical fads, beliefs and recommendations at face value and start to take personal ownership and accountability for your BI methodology you not only gain the strategic competitive advantage but will save millions of dollars over the next five years. To lay your foundation that is scientifically aligned to global strategic alignment you must think and believe success as a start:

a)     Think global and strategic even if you are a small company in Fremont California. This will ensure your designs do not break at the seams as soon as you hit hyper growth

b)     Build a ‘Global Enterprise BI Cookbook’ as your foundation of rules and regulations and the referential methodology for all development done in any of your BI environments.

c)      As a first step build your global standards, processes and FEDW Architecture guidelines, all other components can come subsequently. Each task you conduction without this in place will take your BI farther from your strategic BI

d)     Find your BI Business Value Architect that works only for the global success of your company and who comes with a solid business and your BI technology background. This has to be an external expert

e)     Build your BI COE or COC as Gartner calls it. This must be built on the traditional Gartner COC concepts. Understand the COE requirements before you accept it

3.    Business Value Attainment

Most BI projects focus too much on the technology and too little on the true business benefits. True strategic competitiveness can only be attained by focusing on true Business Value Attainment, which is very different from perceived value. Conventional technocratic BI projects attempt to keep business stakeholders out of BI project room in varying degrees. The scientific principles of BVA mandate an active participation of information consumers in all things BI. Business, rather than being viewed as ignorant time wasters, and now viewed as anchors, judge and jury members. The BVA methodology requires business to question everything, while still maintaining a very tight rein to keep them within a solid framework of thinking. To master this skill you must:

a)     Get all your Key BI Stakeholders, especially business, executives who will decide and sign on tasks and contracts, into a short 4 to 6 hour ‘Strategic BVA in BI’ training. This will empower them to understand strategic impacts of their decisions

b)     Appoint an internal ‘Business Value Owner’. This cannot be an external contractor or an intermediary systems integrator but has to be an internal employee with very high protocol authorization. Their role is ‘Meet Business Expectations’

c)      Make small alterations to global processes to commence BVA reporting on a weekly basis

d)     Learn to differentiate flashy ‘value’ statements from true BVA for your business users

4.    Process Compliance

Almost every BI project has some form of Standard and Process documentation. Less than twenty percent of them actually use it. If you allow this herd-like anarchy to continue then your company, your BI investment and possibly your reputation will all be determined by the forces and skills of anarchists. One of the greatest examples that has a direct impact on almost every BI project I have been invited to fix has to do with one critical process, i.e. Functional Specifications. This example is the tip of the iceberg but demonstrates what noncompliance to any process can result in.  The seduction and convenience of this single task is not only very delusional but also extremely destructive for strategic SLA. To master this process compliance use the following example and transmigrate it to your other processes:

a)     Mandate that only business users can actually build and create a functional specification (FS). Thus must never be the SI developers, it must not be an external contractor, nor must it be another SI building this on behalf of business

b)     No development can start without a fully executed, and signed off, functional specification

c)      There must be an official hand-over from business to development for this process; it cannot be a phone call, or a walk by instruction

d)     If development starts and business makes a change to the FS then the total process has to be rolled back and the build timer required to start from the beginning again

5.    Responsibility

A strategic leader is one who leads and does not simply follow. Conventional BI leaders tend to be technocratic and follow the technical future-state. This positions them exceptionally well to try out new solutions and technologies, unfortunately these may not be the strategic investment that the company should be making at that point of time. Strategic leaders need to clearly understand the marketing concepts of their BI and involve the final customers in all decision processes. They need to believe in their own recommendations and personally undertake ownership and accountability to a successful BVA delivery in each investment

a)     Understand the tactical, mid-term and Strategic impact of each initiative you start

b)     Review all available alternatives for the solution with pros and cons. Finalize the decision with a formal signoff by all key stakeholders

c)      Approve an initiative only after you are willing to stake your job on its ability to deliver BVA to your business decision capabilities

d)     Spend as much time as required in planning, with your COE and stakeholders before starting any work. ‘Plan your work, before working your plan’

e)     Trust your ‘Blink’ instinct and clarify each concern. Blink is your gut feeling and personal confidence (from Malcolm Gladwell’s book with the same title)

6.    Think Strategic

That may sound like an oxymoron but conventional wisdom requires us to think two weeks, a month or maximum a year ahead. Tactical wisdom also allows following current technical fads at face value and often results in deploying short term initiatives that are not strategically aligned. Strategic wisdom requires us to think five to ten years in advance. Critical strategic thinkers exist in the future and question every step with a ‘So how will this affect me five or ten years from today’. To master this skill you must force yourself to:

a)     Start each issue resolution with a strategic solution, replacing constant ‘fire-fighting’ with strategic ‘fire prevention’ goals. Identify resources who may get their daily adrenal rush, and feeling of importance, from being in a constant state of Sevrity-1 solutioning.

b)     Reframe your analysis to get the strategic requirements and gains with each task and investment.

c)      Challenge all current beliefs and mindsets, including your own. Encourage alternate views on strategic alignment

d)     Uncover flashy value statements, hypocrisy, manipulations and bias in organizational decisions

7.    Take Decisions

Uncertainty is most unsettling. Without a strategic roadmap the temptation to reach for a fast, and potentially a wrong, solution is imminent. A good strategic leader thinks long-term and does not get distracted by seemingly critical tactical issues. Do not fall prey to “Predictive Freeze” when faced with a multitude of tactical crisis.

a)     Seek patterns and frequencies of issue occurrences, then resolve the patterns and not individual issues

b)     Safeguard your decisions by questioning prevailing assumptions, taking group decisions and analyzing multiple alternatives simultaneously

c)      Carefully frame the decision for its tactical, mid-term and strategic impacts

d)     Remember ‘Excellence is the enemy of good’. Try to remain one step ahead of competition and not get side-tracked by glorious visions of perceived value.

e)     When a decision is required take a stand on what the majority approves is right with current information on all alternatives. Total consensus may be a sign of inadequate research or inaccurate protocol directives

Get ready to be the strategic leader?

Finally to pull off your strategic excellence you must decide who wears the pants in your BI Projects. Trust neutral recommendations of including business stakeholders, i.e. ‘Without business in business intelligence, BI is dead” Gartner. At the base of strategic thinking is the pursuit for excellence by avoiding the pitfalls of mistakes or defects. Traditional definitions do not explain the cause and effect of a soccer ball glancing the goalpost and random chance effects. Thus goals scored should not define strategies but the scientific methodology of proven processes based on empirical standards and deep analysis. For a strategic thinker “a defect is any decision, an action or judgment that is less than optimal, given what was possible from knowable facts at that point of time”. Understand what drives the values of your partners, other stakeholder’s agendas - assuming that most remain hidden, also remember that as companies grow so does politics, and honest feedback becomes correspondingly rare. Encourage both convergent and divergent opinions on the table. Build your risk register and follow each risk with a mitigation plan. In meetings shift discussions if you think they are getting off track or melding into personal agendas. Reward success and review failures and realign your ‘Global BI Cookbook’ processes accordingly.

No matter how we look at this it is a daunting list of tasks, but if we take this one step at a time it is highly realizable and is established as a proverbial path to the end of the rainbow. Each step can be taught and each missing piece of the puzzle can be filled in. Due to my perceived need for this I am planning to release higher degree of details in future columns and a book ‘The Scientific Principles of Information Delivery” I plan to publish in 2012. You may test the strategic alignment of your BI initiative in the following survey

Moneyball, Science and Scientific BI

If you like data and need to understand what science can do to your BI & business see Moneyball the movie.
I normally never watch a movie twice but with Moneyball I had to watch it three times. It resonated with everything I have been trying to do since 2009. Moneyball used empirical science to eliminate defects, it used scientific principles to optimize performance and it used data, pure scientific data to create a new path of how to succeed in a game where experts thought they knew everything there was to know about baseball.

It should come as no surprise that in the late 1800's the industrial thinkers thought that they knew everything about industry and that industry would create everything humans ever desire.
In the early 1900 physics thought that mankind had learned everything there was to know about science, to the point where they even stated that there was nothing left in science to learn or discover.
In the 1990's BI solution architects similarly thought that they now knew everything there was about to learn about data and data warehouses and by the end of the first decade we are surrounded by technocrats that firmly believe that technology alone had all the answers that information users can ever need.

According to Gartner whatever we have been doing in BI so far has not been really successful as the success rate of BI projects languishes below 50%, i.e. "less that 50% of BI projects will meet business expectations"
According to Albert Einstein, "Insanity doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results"

My favorite part is when Billy Beane answers to John when asked why he took his call. To this Billy answered ".. Because I believe science might offer an answer to the curse of the bambinos"

To which John replies
"One of the greatest things about money (in our case scientific principles of BI) is that it does not care what baseball (BI conventional wisdom) thinks or what it doesn’t think" he continued "You have won the exact number of games the Yankees won. But the Yankees paid $1.4 million per win and you paid 260 thousand. The first guy through the wall always gets bloody, always!. This is threatening not just the way of doing business, but in their minds it is threatening the Game. But, what its really threatening is their livelihood, their jobs. It's threatening the way they do things, and everytime that happens whether it’s the government or the way of doing business or whatever it is, the people who ae holding the reigns, holding the switch - they go batshit critzy" and with a slow pause he continues, "Anybody that's not tearing down their team (Conventional BI Methodology) right now and rebuilding it using your model - they're dinosaurs. They'll be sitting on their arses, on the sofa, in October watching the Red Sox win the World Series"
Unquote
This is the starting intro in my new book:  'The Scientific Principles of Information Delivery' planned for Q3 of 2012

Business Executivs 'Feeling Undervalued' in BI Projects

More than 88% of non-IT stakeholders of BI projects, i.e. business users, business owners, business stakeholders and other non-IT stakeholders, of over 250 companies audited feel that they are undervalued at the BI Decision table, according to a survey carried out by BI Valuenomics in 2010-12.

Based on the Gartner report of 2010 which states that ‘Without business in business intelligence, BI is dead” this is not good news at all.

The report clearly demonstrates that

·         48% of business executives believed they were approached only when budgets were required and when IT wanted to hand over their BI deliverables to them. Some of them felt they were discouraged from participating in BI projects altogether either by executive instructions from the company project owner, or by instructions given by the System Integrator leadership.

·         22% felt that IT did not listen to them, even though they were the ones funding the BI initiatives. 18% of them felt that their IT created an environment where communications with business folks was considered a waste of time and resources resulting in more confusion than providing solutions.

·         18% felt that IT did not listen to their suggestions or recommendations.

The report also showed that only 12% of business stakeholders felt that they had a fair value representation in their own BI Initiatives, where they were treated as solution partners. However, they also reported that only 55% of their contributions were valued by the executive management.

The report demonstrated that the quality and trust between IT and Business, specifically in BI projects, is not good , and the latter felt they were not listened to nor leveraged in order to provide the final BI solutions.

Among reasons for lack of satisfaction with their IT counterparts were (a) BI team members taking months to deliver critical reports; (b) IT consistently delivering incomplete reports and analytics that took months to fix and make useable; (c) IT individuals or groups dominating discussions by using technical jargon; (d) insufficient attention to business needs and expectations resulting in delivery of unusable reports; (e) lack of preparation by IT folks resulting in inadequate deliverables.(f) and IT version of COE/COC that had nothing to do with building excellence and with no business participation.

Board members are reportedly doing little to improve the quality of communications or the interaction between these two groups, with only 18% of participants discussing ways to improve this relationship and 82% rarely or never addressed the issue.

At the same time more than 87% of IT stakeholders in BI projects, i.e. BI Managers, BI Business Area Owners, Developers and other IT stakeholders, of over 250 companies audited feel that they too are undervalued on the BI Decision table, according to the same survey carried out by BI Valuenomics in 2010-12.

At a high level  78% of IT executives believed including business in BI decisions was not a good idea. Business participation created an avalanche of unnecessary distractions that increased time and budgets disproportionally. In 26% of the BI project IT recommended their developers not talk directly to business folks, but let them come via approved channels only. Direct contact created a lot of unnecessary development confusion with business users walking up to developers and demanding changes by throwing executive names and threats. 68% of the IT resources felt that business did not really know what they wanted and thus put them into an endless look of ‘deliver this and then change that’ process.

The report clearly demonstrates that:

·         72% felt that business did not follow the process and protocol of filling and signing a ‘Functional Spec’ prior to requesting creation of a report. Sometime they simply sent an email or made a telephone call and started their times for a report request. Development is not supposed to start until the functional spec is signed off and business rarely signs off the functional spec, often expecting the developers to fill them.

·         62% felt that management must play a stronger role in mandating the following of established processes. However, 68% said they had no formal process in place.

·         56% of IT folks felt that business did not play the game fairly by throwing names, demanding changes without a change request and creating confusions where none should exist. This often resulted in tempers where they had to work overtime and during weekends to meet business expectations.

·         32% said that due to lack of planning business would often give them a request on Monday that they delivered by Thursday only to have it rejected and with new instructions by next Monday and this could go on for 2 to 3 months of frustrations on both sides.

·         81% felt that business did not understand the amount of work that IT did for them

The report also showed that only 127% of IT stakeholders felt that they had a fair value representation in their own BI Initiatives, where they were treated as solution providers. However, they also reported that only 45% of their contributions were valued by the executive management.

The report reaffirmed that the quality and trust between IT and Business, specifically in BI projects, is not good , and the former equally felt they were not being being dragged into a process-less world by overactive business bearcats.

Among reasons for lack of satisfaction with their Business counterparts were (a) Business not knowing what they wanted and constantly changin specifications without change process; (b) Business never formally writing functional specs, or signing them off, and thinking a call for a report request constituted deliverables;  (c) Business frequently walking in at 5pm and demanding change to a critical report by next morning for a senior management executive (d) insufficient empathy to development process, standards and the developers in the process of delivering reports and analytics; (e) lack of preparation by business folks resulting in inadequate deliverables.

The ‘Feeling Neglected’ is endemic on both sides according to the report. So who is wrong.

Actually it is the management that is in error in these companies. They must commence, if they don’t already have, the documentation of a ‘Global BI Cookbook’ with clear standards, processes and other BI details.

In order to resolve a lot of the above issues companies need to initiate a ‘BI-OnTrack’ workshop and build a ‘BI Process Handbook’ based on clear SIPOC handovers. This must then be communicated to business and IT folks with a formal signoff.

This can be turned around from the current sputtering team into a well-oiled machine in a matter of 2 to 4 weeks only. This is not an assumption as I have done this with a company recently.

The key is in establishing ‘The Scientific Principles of Information Delivery’ – my new book due for publishing in Q3 of 2012.

Who wears the pants in your BI Project- IT or business?

Just a year ago I was in a Global Fortune 1000 company planning to start a new BusinessObjects 4.0 Ramp-Up project finalizing the weekly project activities. I requested that each report be assigned a report owner, and the report owner and the project team communicate on a weekly basis. After the meeting the IT manager went politely ballistic and asked me not to do that again as IT knew what business needed, revalidating his belief with a  “.. we have been delivering them reports for the last 10 plus years so actually we know more about what they need than most of them know by themselves..”.
My experience had consistently demonstrated that this attitude was the prime reason that BI projects unswervingly failed to meet business expectations.
Fast forward two months later and I had managed to convince the business stakeholders that they needed to help not only define but also design the layouts of the Web Intelligence reports, using their existing specifications designed by their internal SAP BW resources that looked like an apologetic Bex+ Excel Report. I proceeded to demonstrate how creative designs could be undertaken with WebI Analytics and why a report user was mandatory for the process, all the while faced with a stern look from my IT manager who continued to give me dirty smiles with cold eyes.
Fast forward 1 week after go live, the project scored 106% in user satisfaction and my IT manager gave me genuine smiles with a ‘..I thought you were mad.. now I see your point of view..”. Fast forward 20 weeks and the business stakeholders want to dive into their next project, and the IT manager wants to speak at ASUG and share his conversion with the rest of the world.

So the question we all need to review is that if IT folks are consistently smarter than Business folks, why is their success disproportionately lower in Business Intelligence projects? By the way this paper is very BI relevant and does not apply to any other IT work at all.

I still remember learning in grad school to leave special things to specialists, and that CFO’s were better at finance, and MBA’s were better at managing, engineers made better IT employees and that women were better at marketing and men in Supply Chain. These things were presented as general facts and none of us questioned it one bit, not until working for many years and viewing the same statements through the lens of experience. Suddenly all these statements turned out to be preposterous in most situations.

But the damage of these statements has already been done before most of us even start working and for most of us it continues way beyond our retirement days.

Here are some reported stats:

1.    Business knows more about business that does IT

a.    Yes     78%

b.    No      15%

2.    Business participates in all BI Decisions

a.    Yes     21%

b.    No      79%

3.    When asked if they understood how BI technology works

a.    Business        9%

b.    IT                 91%

4.    IT Folks- When asked if business had the ability to decide on BI decision         

a.    Yes     11%

b.    No      89%

5.    Business Folks: When asked in business had the ability to decide on BI decisions

a.    Yes     72%

b.    No      28%

6.    Key Decision Executives: Belief that business participation  is a hindrance in BI projects

a.    Yes     68%

b.    No      32%

7.    Who takes the final  decisions of reports to be delivered/

a.    Business        21%

b.    IT                 79%

8.    BI Participation facts

a.    Funding participation            Business 90%          IT 10%

b.    Contract finalization            Business   2%          IT  98%

c.    Vendor Selection                Business   6%          IT  94%

d.    Reports for delivery            Business  10%         IT  90%

e.    Resource Selection             Business   2%          IT  98%

f.     Architecture                      Business   5%          IT  95%

g.    Modeling                           Business   2%          IT  98%

h.    UAT reports decision           Business  15%          IT  85%

In every 25 decisions undertaken in BI projects that do not deal with coding only 3 are taken by business.
A lot of these facts are likely things you have heard before, like business need to be kept out of BI Project rooms as they can only add confusion to  BI projects. However, seeing each of these facts in this pseudo-chronological order, from high school to being a BI strategy architect professional, it seems inevitable that business don’t stake their place in BI projects that are already dominated by technocrats.

This picture is incomplete, of course. We rarely scientifically plan on how to enable a CFO, who knows everything there is in finance, into a key-decision enabler. We don’t have a handbook that business can use to take ownership and accountabilities in their BI initiatives, neither do we have a steering committee checklist that guides them on the impact of decisions on their strategic goals. But it’s still safe to say that around 16% of BI projects are staffed and owned by business stakeholders, this does not include a contract resource hired to represent business interests under any flavor.   

 Twenty years or so after that day in learning school, I’m today a writer and a solution architect for BI projects with a lot of Fortune 1000 companies across north America. So I guess that, given these territorial and technocratic professional norms have been erroneously placing key stakeholders into the wrong silos. The question that Gartner started and I am passionately researching is who wears the pants in a BI project. I came from business, went to IT and now exist somewhere in between today. No matter what stakeholders do in BI projects, business will always be smarter about business facts and expectations that any one else ever can plan to be.