Are BI tools a trusted advisor?

In order to take decisions people get advised with someone or something they trust and feel comfortable with, a 'trusted advisor'. BI tools are mainly deployed to support corporate end-users taking business decisions. Do end-users perceive BI tools as trusted advisor? according to recent Forrester research, most of them not.

This research is an example to the point I made in my last post, that vendors should build products customers want to use. According to the research, more than half of IT managers said their end-users reverted back to individual tools, such as desktop spreadsheets, to get data or reports they couldn't get through the BI applications. Two-thirds of respondents said their end-users felt the BI tools were somewhat or very difficult to learn.

In the quest for a good advise, you often need a middleman to connect you with the right trusted advisor or communicate with her for you. Corporate use middlemen to analyze needs, deploy and implement BI systems, generate reports, guide end-users and more. The research shows that we still far from self-service BI, as three-quarters of respondents said most reports and dashboards are not created by end-users.

Corporate may choose to use an internal (i.e. IT department) or an external (i.e. BI consultancy service) middleman. In general, the more your business environment is turbulent, the more likely you will need to adapt your BI implementation to new business decision needs. In that case, you may want an internal IT resource that give you the needed flexibility.

Whether you use internal or external middleman, it is clear that one is needed. Corporate leverage their BI investment by finding their end-users a trusted advisor.

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Build products customers want to use

Common knowledge is that companies should build products customers want to buy, products that solves their problem. However, making customer buy your product is not enough. The product must be built in a way that will make its users actually... want to use it.

Sound obvious and simple, right? However, many vendors believe that top-notch technology or cool features would make their product best-seller. Reality prove they wrong, especially when thinking of management software products that users should elaborate on a daily basis in order to drive business value.

For example, BPM suites may have best-of-breed processing engine technology, but without friendly process designer that make it simple to design processes, users will avoid implementing new processes. Another example are BI products; as BI implementation projects take weeks or even months, users don't have the flexibility to leverage it for short time-to-market needs.

If we already made the deal, why should we care if users actually use the product? Satisfied users are great reference for recurring revenue and new deals. In case of web-based products that generate their money out of advertisements, active users are your power in negotiation with advertisers. Moreover, active users - satisfied or not, serve as great source of product feedback.

But important of all – it is the great feeling that you changed the world a bit... or at least helped a user achieve her goal easier, faster, or better than she did without you. Many times users have the frustrating feeling that they are for working for their product ('I must enter yesterday data into the system'). Why not give the user a feeling the product is working for her?

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