Enterprise Business Intelligence: Strategies for Gaining Broad User Adoption

By Tracy Harris, Campaigns Manager, Product Marketing, Cognos Incorporated

Gaining broad support for your IT efforts is not always easy. Getting users to move from comfortable practices or to ease reliance on IT staff and dive into new technologies can be met with resistance. But the need to deliver accurate and timely business insight to all your users is imperative – not only to reduce your workload – but to ensure the organization can react quickly and improve overall business performance.

It is also in your best interest to free up time and reduce backlogs by enabling business users to move to self-service practices. And getting your users to find their own business insight will not only lighten your workload a bit but also allow you more time to innovate. Broad user adoption will also demonstrate the value that IT brings to the organization and instill user confidence by delivering accurate and timely information.

Mandating and forcing users to adopt a standard practice or technology will often create resistance and political backlash. So how can an IT department gain support for its effort and encourage user adoption without internal politics? Many of our customers have developed tried and tested strategies for accomplishing broad user adoption and we are happy to pass this insight onto you:

Prove Success

You will never accomplish change without resistance if you cannot prove your solution will work. First – you need to demonstrate an initiative that will show your audience success is possible. Then engage a few supporters that will help evangelize your project. Pick the low-hanging fruit - get a project up and running quickly and demonstrate it to the business. As an example, you could target a reporting project in your marketing department - not only can they give you a business project that might benefit both the marketing and sales department, but they could help you market your project internally.

Demonstrate the Features that Make it Easy for the User

As performance management systems mature, all the new and exciting features are bringing business insight to life for users. Not only can you click, drag and drop your way through a slick web interface in Cognos 8 BI – but additional, ‘cool’ features can make the business user’s mouth water:

• Office Connection: The business units spend an enormous amount of time creating presentations, spreadsheets, and reports – often graphing, bar-charting and adding stats with technologies they are not familiar with and crossing their fingers that it will be accurate and visually pleasing. Cognos 8 BI takes the angst out of all of this for them – easily moving accurate data from their performance management system and popping it into PowerPoint, Word or Excel.
• Search: Users do not want to sift through files and folders in order to find the business information they need. They want to "Google" it and have it land at their fingertips. Cognos 8 BI has tight integration with Google Enterprise Search and IBM Omnifind so that users can find the enterprise BI they need quickly and easily.
• Mobile Devices: Soon Cognos 8 BI will also have mobile capabilities – and what executive wouldn’t want to view, drill and even deep dive into their information in real-time on their BlackBerry? "BI on the move" is a real winner in the executive ranks.
• Dashboards/Scorecards: How about a slick dashboard or scorecard for users that need it most? Whether it is operational or strategic, high-level information that can easily be viewed and drilled into is extremely valuable – giving attention to detail where it is most needed.
• Event Management: Push important news and alerts to users in a timely and personalized way. With event management, users can be automatically notified of pertinent BI information, plus manage and action events immediately.

Establish a BI Competency Center

Aligning IT and business goals and objectives is an age-old problem that can be addressed through a BI Competency Center. Bringing the right people together to help enable the project and nail down the business needs is critical to a performance management initiative. You need the right set of people and the right representation from the areas of the organization that can improve and transform your business. In addition, an executive sponsor is critical to the project’s success.

A BICC can also spawn a regular meeting and forum where the project can be marketed, promoted and embraced. This, by definition, will also give the project an elevated status in the organization – and demonstrate the importance of transformational IT. A BICC is a strategic forum for key players that: gives insight into success stories to market the project; shares best practices to get users up and running quickly; and prioritizes projects and actions.

Transform the Business

Transforming and changing the way people do business is never easy. You need to gain their trust and support, as well as show them the value of making a change. But the benefits of business transformation with performance management will lead to improved performance, competitiveness in the market and to your ultimate success – demonstrating the value of the IT department in a way that is apparent to the business.