Michael Gibson provides his perspective on best practice BI in the first of a series of Guest Posts from other Australian Universities
Michael is Data Warehouse Manager at Deakin University in Victoria, Australia
Due to the common practice of Australian Universities failing to properly recognise the promise of Business Intelligence initiatives, it seems clear to me that many institutions have embarked on the BI journey ill-prepared. The result being institutions that have not been aware of accepted best practice, and initial implementations that are lacking in many critical aspects.
Some institutions will recognise this and look to rectify the situation at a later date – once more funding becomes available. But wouldn’t it be nice if this didn’t have to happen?
I understand that most institutions are genuinely constrained financially, and will not have the resources of the private sector available for these sorts of programmes. This means that compromises are often necessary, but after talking to many people from other Universities I believe it’s more than just a financial issue.
It seems to me to also be a cultural issue. I don’t believe that Universities are in the practice of looking externally for expertise, nor are they usually open to many new ideas (not that BI is a very new idea). Universities will often assume they can achieve their goals without assistance or sufficient funding. But be that as it may, we all know that changing the culture within any organisation is a very difficult prospect.
So what are the problems I speak of? Well, not being aware of best practices means institutions are usually not aware of the ideal way(s) to approach BI. They will often start down the path with no, or poor planning (i.e. no BI strategy), and even if they did have an effective plan, they implement it poorly. With the overall result being an initiative that delivers far less than it could have.
How do you become aware of best practice? With BI being a mature, specialised discipline, I personally believe there is little point in trying to learn it all yourself – as you are destined to fall into the many traps others did before you. Essentially you need the sort of expertise that comes with experience.
How do you do this if you do not have any money? Well, the short answer is that you probably can’t. There aren’t any magic bullets. You need at least some money to acquire the necessary expertise.
The best hope is to find an executive with vision, who is open to new ways of doing things, and trying to convince them to give you some cash!
Michael Gibson
Data Warehouse Manager
Deakin University
“The best hope is to find an executive with vision, who is open to new ways of doing things, and trying to convince them to give you some cash!”
On that note, with the idea of funding by Compact hovering over our heads, it provides a uniquely interesting opportunity to highlight the effect of Business Intelligence, many of you will have already mapped the indicators on the Learning and Teaching Performance Fund, such as progress rates. If you where anything like us we threw all of our dimensions at the cube so we could poke and prod the data from demographic, course level, regional, entrance score and more points of view. Combined with National data you can show how valuable a few percentage points are, and point to where you might find those percentage points.
Compact’s promise a more complex, broader problem while following the same underlying principles, a quick win on that front might just win enough brownie points to secure the leverage and funding you need to do something really special.
Great first blog and as ever Michael puts it neatly in a nutshell.
Culture is a big issue for BI implementations at universities. I agree it can hinder strategies at the top, but it also goes on to affect rollout of BI throughout an organisation … BI champions really are a must at so many levels and there is a real need to identify them early in the piece.
I’ve also found annual budget cycles tend to epitomise “cats in a sack” and make delivery of longer-term, complex projects and developments even more tricky than they already are.
Love the use of “magic bullet” … I tend to use “silver bullet”, but also heard someone say they just wanted an “add water” solution to all their data problems the other day … ho hum!
To get buy-in to BI, the vision must be concrete. We need to focus on tangible outcomes from the BI project. Yes, culture is a big issue, but too frequently it is also the lack of clarity and direction of the BI team and the inability to translate the vision into tangible outcomes that stalls the project.
My approach is to solve a particular business challenge requiring some BI infrastructure, then incrementally roll out further capability to solve more complex requirements. Great blog.