While meeting with an organization the other day we were discussing the purpose of the BI dashboards, reports, and Analytics. The organization had invested in building a trusted and integrated data warehouse that was well audited and confirmed to be the best version of the truth. However, the Business Intelligence content wasn’t getting the adoption the IT department had hoped. Rather, the business stakeholders were continuing to use their old habits for getting at data. This is a vexing problem which many organizations deal with, so I wanted to share some perspectives and practices.
On the perspective side, think of your BI solution as the latest news from your organization, just like you have trusted news sources for current events which you believe have high standards for vetting the truth. Your BI solution needs to be seen as the go-to trusted source for your organization's latest news, and those other sources of BI which don’t have the vetting and full picture of your data warehouse might need to be seen for what they often are… fake news. Avoiding fake news is really what a centralized and trusted data warehouse is all about. And THIS is why business stakeholders must be involved in implementing your data warehouse. If they don’t see the Data Warehouse as a trusted news source then they won’t be able to get behind your BI dashboards and analytics. If you’ve accomplished that and if a data warehouse is in place, the BI team needs to drive a cultural battle of eliminating fake news from the organization, starting from management members on down.
Now, this doesn’t have to be a negative thing. There are a lot of practices to drive adoption which can feel almost organic. Effective marketing by business stakeholders can be the honey you need to attract people to use your data warehouse as a trusted source, so if you have an executive or a trusted data guy from the Business Stakeholder side to present to the rest of the organization you’ll make great progress. Sometimes, however, the BI team needs Business Leaders to carry a stick when it comes to pushing back on fake news sources. If leaders reject fake news when they make decisions then it will drive producers of such news to find their data from the data warehouse, and better yet the vetted Enterprise BI dashboards and analytics rather than their excel spreadsheet.
Another tactic which Intricity has helped customers with is a custom video, like this one, which markets either the problem or solution you want your organization to be aware of. Of course, these private videos are for your internal audience, but it enables you to spread the message about the problem you just solved and get specific about what new behaviors the organization needs to adopt. We’ve found it to be a great way of spreading a viral internal message.
If you’d like to investigate leveraging an Intricity video for your internal marketing, take a look at our packaged proposal for a custom internal video. Or reach out to us to talk with a specialist.
Here's the whitepaper: Intricity Custom Video
