A Voice on the Battle Field

I’ve often told co-workers that we need to find evangelists for BI, someone in the business who not only “gets it” but is willing to shout it from the mountain tops about how BI has helped them work smarter. Unfortunately this isn’t always the easiest task to accomplish, as you have to find the right combination of risk taker and analytical thinker.

You might think that you should head straight to the most successful line of business since they are the most visible, but since they are already doing well, they might resist change. On the other side,  the worst performing areas are not a good  candidate either because they might not have time to wait for a solution, and if they are trying to keep their head’s above water they won’t want to take time to learn something new.

Your best bet might be a middle of the road player… someone who isn’t struggling but in the same regard they aren’t killing it either. The middle of the road player is looking for a game-changer, something to make the move to the next level a little easier and BI just might be their ladder to the next step.

Make Friends and Influence People

Early in my career, my manager taught me that sometime you have to “sit on someone’s desk” to get their attention, but in the process you also get to know them because on a face to face visit, verses and email, you will naturally engage in small talk. In one instance I was getting to know one of the marketing managers and he mentioned he was looking for some reporting around his product lines but he wasn’t getting what he needed. I saw this as an opportunity so I started to show him some of the things I had been working on but hadn’t gotten in to production yet. With a little tweaking he was able to get what he needed and it helped him move up the corporate ladder a bit in the long run.

From that point, he became an advocate and when people asked him about his reports he was happy to point them in my direction. Soon we had all the sales office managers using our BI solution, and they were extremely thankful once they adopted the technology and made it part of their daily lives.

Not Just a Flick of the Switch

One of the more delicate points that often gets overlook is the training side of BI adoption. We need to aim to deliver BI solutions that are easy to use and require a minimal amount of training, but that training has to be effective.

With evangelists, it always starts as a one on one session at their desk and I watched how they interacted with the tool. Make note of the questions they asked and the order that they asked them in because it can aid the development of the training materials. After a few of these desk side sessions you need to take your notes, and feedback from your evangelist and start building your training library.

Think about delivery method; should it be a downloadable instructional video, a self guided Power Point presentation or are small group instructor lead session most effective in your organization? Maybe the answer is all three, because if you give them choice on how they are trained they will do what they are most comfortable with in the end.

In the End, it’s All About Showing Value

When it’s all said and done, the value of the BI solution has to be evident. if the evangelist just thinks that his dashboard is cool but it’s not really driving his business what have you really delivered? The more obvious the KPIs and ultimately the value of the solution is to see, the easier the BI adoption will be to achieve.

If you ride a motorcycle I am sure you have heard things like ”Ride like you are invisible” or ”Loud pipes save lives.” Now I personally don’t prescribe to that last piece of rider wisdom, and I follow the “loud colors saves lives” motto since light travels faster than sound. When I ride, especially in heavy traffic areas, I wear a bright white helmet and what is described as a “hi-viz” jacket. I’m sure you’ve seen them as they are either bright green or orange, similar to what DOT construction workers wear or what police officers wear when directing traffic.  When you ride, it’s important to stay visible because when no one notices you that’s when you can get hurt. Things like choice of clothing, lane positioning, following distance and even the headlight on your motorcycle all play a part is your ability to remain visible. I’ve never understood the logic of wearing black protective gear because all you do is blending with the road you are riding on, and no one can see you from a distance.

Staying visible in a business intelligence sense can be tricky, because sometimes the value that you are adding to the business in only realized by the people seeing that direct benefit. As a team, it is important to be evangelists for the work you do! I’ve seen some team put out a monthly news letter with articles written by the business users they have helped, including cost savings and the potential return on investment.

Have you ever hear a C-level executive say something like “This quarter’s performance is solely based on the decisions I was able to make thanks to the data that our business intelligence solution enabled me to analyze”?

Me neither.

So we have to be vigilant in presenting not only quality solutions to the business, but we also have to be our own PR machine so that the business knows how great we are for the business! Here are a few more ideas to help publicize yourself to the organization.

Schedule “Lunch and Learn” events and invite different areas of the business to learn about what you have done, be sure and provide lunch.

Conduct training on tools or the solution itself to key business members so they know how to best use what they have been given.

Create a team website, post regularly about what the team is doing, and what is on the BI horizon.

Write something in the corporate newsletter, direct them to your team’s website for more information.

If you’ve done some truly amazing things, you can do these things as well, because if you can be nationally recognized for the work you’ve done, the business will take notice as well.

Publish a white paper talking about your solution, or unique ways you used tools or technology to bring value to the business.

Submit your work to TDWI for the TDWI Best Practice Award.

Work with your tool vendor and become a case study.

Of you are extremely creative, you can go the SAP route and produce an awesome video to send out internally to promote BI4ALL!

In motorcycling being visible can mean the difference between making it to your destination, or ending up in the hospital (or worse) and in business intelligence it is just as important. If the business doesn’t know you are there, they won’t know who to ask when they need a business intelligence solution, and worse yet, when times get tough it may be the BI team on the chopping block.