Increasing the user base to deliver ROI is still one of the biggest Business Intelligence (BI) challenges, even within pioneer companies. Leaders must start with understanding BI users since most BI implementations fail as a result of poor user acceptance.

Build It and They Won't Come!

A large company with more than 32,000 employees implemented a multi-terabyte enterprise data warehouse. The business case was approved based on projected savings from data mart consolidation and the ability to easily create reports across multiple functional areas. Several months and more than $20 million dollars later, the system usage was less than 35 concurrent users at peak times. As development continued, the data structures became increasingly complex and less usable.

A BI tool implementation was pitched as the silver bullet for addressing the usability issues and driving self service. However, after spending more than $1.5 million, the very users that signed off on the requirements found multiple reasons why they should not use the newly developed application. From their perspective, although the final product better satisfied power users, it took too much time to get results. The application had less than five...