Do you have the right environment?

Even with the best intentions, business intelligence initiatives often end up failing. Why is this? The main reason is that most companies put most of their focus and effort on the tools for the job and forget to ensure they have the right environment to ensure their initiative’s success.

If you’re thinking of embarking on a new BI project or are in the midst of one, take a moment to make sure you have the right environment to support it. Here are five areas you should review:

Strong Mission

Everyone on the team should know what the main goals of the group are and how the BI project fits in with these goals. Not only will they be more likely to support the project when they see this, but it will also help them apply the data they gather later to meet these goals.

Trust

Is the team working in a strong environment of trust? Trust is necessary to ensure people speak up when something isn’t going well with the tool or they find an issue. If there isn’t a strong level of trust people may hesitate to speak up about problems.

Collaboration and Sharing

An environment that fosters participation and the sharing of information will ensure that more value will come from the data and people will build upon what others have done.

Knowledge-Building

A team that is encouraged to constantly be updating their knowledge and continue to learn new skills will be more likely to want to learn how to use a new tool and appreciate what it can bring to their team. 

Curiosity

Teams that have been encouraged to ask questions and explore new information will do better at fully mining data available to them in a new BI project.