User Adoption Rates
So let’s deal with the elephant in the room: the continuing low rate of Business User BI Adoption, which is the key BI metric that reflects the degree to which BI systems are actually being used in the course of real work (my definition). Google ‘Business User BI Adoption Rates’ and you will be overwhelmed with choices. Lottsa stuff has been written for years about this, and the list of opportunities for improvement has been pretty consistent:
- Executive buy-in (the cure for all ills), Business/IT Alignment, User Training
- Data Management (availability, quality, governance), New Tools and Technologies, Integration
- Ease of Access, Timeliness
- Etc.
All of the above are, of course, very important, and one should not imply otherwise. A comprehensive piece on this was written not too long ago by tdwi (Increasing BI Adoption). And yet Adoption Rates have remained flat. Is the advice wrong or are we simply unable to act upon it? What are we missing?
Because it’s not an IT problem and cannot be fixed if we approach it that way.
Think otherwise? Consider a typical, architectural view of Business Intelligence systems:
Source: Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App
Cindi Howson (McGraw-Hill; 2007)
But how would a Business User view the same set of capabilities? How many of us have tried to describe BI to our functional counterparts in this way – and then encountered glazed-over looks? They don’t really care, and they detach at that moment. BI becomes an IT project instead of a Business project. Is it any wonder adoption is weak?
Viewing BI from a business perspective yields an entirely different result. It, by nature, would result in an end-to-end process view. Technology (the beginning of such a process) would be defined by the use of the information delivered (the end of such a process). Business users would be much more engaged. From a business perspective, I’d propose an entirely different way of viewing BI Architecture:
In this way, the Business Process would drive the requirements and the dialogue with business users. Yes, that moves us out of our comfort zone (technology and applications), but it is the secret to dealing with the User Adoption problem.
Regards,
Rick
