The Magnificent 7 BI Quotes- Famous quotes to make every HANA projects a success

Often when one reads a great quote it has the power of firstly making you pause in sheer delight. Then if it good it makes you ponder and relate it to one’s life experience. If it is really astounding it has the power to alter the way we look at life and in this case alter the way we move ahead with how we look at the delivery and design of information management initiatives. This includes BI or deployment of BI projects. Throughout my life I have been blessed with words that have influenced me and some that have cohesively change the way I look at my past behavior, with an impact of changing how I would do things henceforth. Just like data is the center-of-the-universe in a data warehouse, words are the winds that guide our ship of enlightenment and imagination.

My favorite is

1.      “Without business in business intelligence, BI is dead” Gartner

o   Translation: The more you involve business in every BI decision the more successful your BI project will be. In every BI project where I have involved business we have beaten the Gartner nightmare (see 4 & 5). If your SI asks that business users be kept outside your BI project doors – you are highly recommended to quickly show them yours.

After that

2.      “98% of BI projects are declared successful on week 1, yet only 50% of them remain successful by week 10” 2010 BI Valuenomics

o   Translation: “The success of a BI project can only be measured by how satisfied your business users are 15-20 weeks after go live.

3.      “Show me a person who has never made a mistake, and I’ll show you a fool” Bernard Shaw

o   Translation: Mistakes are the foundation of evolution. But, only if we can learn from them. If someone is arrogant enough to state they have always been right either they have no creative ideas, or they are liars.

4.      “Fewer than 50% of BI projects will meet business expectations” Gartner 2003

o   Translation: There is a high probability that if your BI project went live between 2003 and 2010 that over 50% of the reports in your production environment are not being used by your business users”

5.      “Fewer than 30% of BI projects will meet business expectations from 2012 to 2014” Gartner 2014

o   Translation: As we continue to follow the same old rules on to new technologies all we are doing is accelerating our acceleration towards defects and failure.

6.      “Insanity is doing the same thing again and again, and expecting different results” Albert Einstein

o   Translation: Tangential thinking (Edward de Bono)  logic stats that we all feel most comfortable doing things that we have done before. This means that if we introduce a developer with legacy standards to new HANA standards and processes they will most likely revert to their old methods unless we they are audited and regulated frequently – until the new order becomes they way of their life.

7.       On big data and new technologies “This is a time of accelerating change, where your current IT architecture will be rendered obsolete,” Mr. Sondergaard, Gartner Analyst, said. “You must lead through this change, selectively destroy low impact systems, and aggressively change your IT cost structure. This is the New World of the Nexus, the next age of computing.”

o   Translation: With HANA as the new SAP platform you will need to change your architecture to global FEDW (Gartner 2013) designs, work with new HANA standards and processes and take modeling to focus on new challenges. The only way forward is scientific change that selectively destroys old inefficiencies and replaces them with modern methodologies that increase the overall data quality, decreases the overall cost and time in one single step.

To me, the first key takeaway is to push yourself through fear and uncertainty and place your life not on current Technocratic authoritarian assumptions that technology alone can answer all questions. The second is to realize that HANA is not just another technical installation but a business solutions. The third is that companies that follow the old technocratic methodologies will either go the way of Gartner's predictions for 2012 (see #5) or land into the insanity bracket of Albert Einstein (see 6). The choice is clear and now the writing's on the wall