Business Intelligence Excellence: A Company's Journey to Business Intelligence Maturity
Authors: Paul Hawking
Year: 2011

This paper is a case study which describes a company’s Business Intelligence (BI) journey. Although Business Intelligence is seen as priority by many companies the level of benefits achieved varies significantly. Often this is dependent on the level of Business Intelligence maturity. This paper documents a company’s trials and tribulations with their BI implementations. The paper maps and discusses the company’s Business Intelligence best practices. KEYWORDS; Business Intelligence, Business Performance, Case Study INTRODUCTION Companies today have all come to realise the importance of providing accurate, relevant and timely information— information that allows their organisational personnel to engage in effective decision-making practices. Accenture interviewed 163 executives from large enterprises around the world to identify how companies were using Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to improve business performance and the specific practices that resulted in sustained value creation (Davenport et al, 2003). They found that the implementation of an enterprise-wide information system resulted in sustained value creation however; some companies realised far more comparable benefits than others. A more extensive follow up study in 2006 involving 450 executives from 370 companies identified the factors that drove value from their ERP system, as well how companies used these systems to enhance competitiveness and differentiation (Harris and Davenport, 2006). One of the key findings from this study was that improved decision making was the most desired benefit. Related to this finding was that the top performing companies aggressively used information and analytics to improve their decision making. These findings are supported by Gartner, a leading business analyst firm, who conducted a worldwide survey of 1,500 Chief Information Officers and identified Business Intelligence (BI) as the number one technology priority for companies, followed by ERP systems (Gartner, 2008). In a Cutter Consortium Report (2003), a survey of 142 companies it was found that 70% of the respondents had implemented data warehousing and Business Intelligence initiatives. The increased focus on BI is reflected in the forecasted BI vendor revenue expected of $7.7 billion by 2012 (Sommer, 2008). Although Business Intelligence is seen as a priority for many companies to survive in a competitive market there is uncertainty as to the path to follow. Researchers have identified that companies utilise Business Intelligence in different ways, with varying levels of success. A review of literature indicates that a number of companies often fail to realise expected benefits of Business Intelligence and sometimes consider the project to be a failure in itself (Chenoweth et. al., 2006; Hwang et al., 2004; Johnson, 2004; Arte 2003; Adelman and Moss 2002). Gartner predicted that more than half of the Global 2000 enterprises would fail to realise the capabilities of Business Intelligence and would lose market share to the companies that did (Dresner et al, 2002). A survey of 142 companies found that 41 percent of the respondents had experienced at least one Business Intelligence project failure and only 15 percent of respondents believed that their Business Intelligence initiative was a major success (Cutter Consortium Report, 2003). Moss and Atre (2003) indicated that 60% of Business Intelligence projects failed due to poor planning, poor project management, undelivered business requirements, or of those that were delivered, many were of poor quality. A number of authors believe that in many Business Intelligence projects the information that is generated is inaccurate or irrelevant to the user’s needs or indeed, delivered too late to be useful (Ballou and Tayi, 1999; Strong et al., 1997). Researchers have attempted to map Business Intelligence usage and best practices to provide a roadmap for companies to move forward in an attempt to maximise the benefits of their Business Intelligence initiatives. One approach for this roadmap has been the development of Business Intelligence Maturity Models (Watson et al, 2001; McDonald, 2004; Hamer, 2005; Eckerson, 2007, ASUG, 2007; Hewlett Packard, 2007). The purpose of these models is to provide companies with a roadmap to improve the management of their corporate data, as well as maximise the benefits obtained from Business Intelligence. Each year Gartner identifies companies for Business Intelligence Awards of Excellence. It would be reasonable to expect that a company which achieved such an award would be very mature as per the model. The remainder of the paper contains a case study documenting a company’s BI journey. This same company was a recent of the Gartner Business Intelligence Award of Excellence, (alias Acme Manufacturing).