Radiant radiant top 10 mistakes to avoid when adopting emerging technologies in bi by Radiant Advisors

Top 10 Mistakes to Avoid When Adopting Emerging Technologies in BI By John O’Brien, CBIP | Principal & CEO, Radiant Advisors December 17, 2012 Reprinted with permission of 1105 Media, Inc. Foreword Research has shown that the top-performing companies in nearly every industry share the characteristics of being innovative and adopting emerging technologies into the fabric of their business DNA. Companies that can effectively adopt and leverage emerging technologies can create innovative new products and become more efficient in managing costs and processes. These organizations realize tangible value that increases their competitive advantage and secures their position as leaders in their markets. However, you should be aware of the risks and mistakes commonly encountered when evaluating and adopting a new technology. A few wrong choices or bad decisions can cost your business a great deal of time, money, and resources; cause undue distraction; and lower morale. Awareness and insights to mitigate and overcome these common mistakes will prepare you for navigating emerging technology options and determining best-fit solutions for your organization’s needs. These 10 mistakes to avoid center around three key themes: identifying transformational or disruptive technologies, minimizing and managing risk to the overall program, and maintaining a continuing balance in business intelligence (BI) programs. Mistake One: Confusing Product Combinations with Emerging Technologies Sometimes you discover a new BI vendor or product with an innovative approach you like, but it really does the same thing other products in your BI technology stack already do, only better. Be sure to recognize the core capabilities being addressed by different technology solutions because there are usually multiple ways to solve a problem. The new technology may be better, but the transition cost of switching to a new technology—or the additional cost of maintaining another tool—could strip away the potential incremental value. Additionally, you may have the opportunity to realize the value in the “morebetter-faster” incremental upgrades to specific technologies already in the BI stack. These upgrades also have a low incremental cost of disruption and few resources to implement, and should not be confused with emerging technologies because the incremental value could be nullified by the incremental cost to upgrade. Keep in mind that emerging technologies will generally not come from incumbent BI vendors and products. Each product release will improve performance or add new features. Established BI vendors are instead looking at the emerging technologies space to identify new, proven products consistent with their technology and strategy that they can acquire and offer to their customers. When you adopt a new emerging technology, weigh significant value against disruption. Emerging technologies will be “game changers” in your BI stack and unleash new capabilities for the business, but they should not be erased by upgrade and ongoing maintenance costs. Mistake Two: Failing to Articulate Value to the Business Sponsors Identifying and evaluating emerging BI technologies should remain the role of the BI programs that guide your company’s BI strategy to contribute towards achieving goals. The BI program must be able to clearly articulate the technology’s value to business sponsors for adoption and cost justification to demonstrate a clear and accountable value proposition, and that assumptions and risks are recognized and accounted for. Adopting emerging technologies can consume key resources for extended periods of time, distract other development teams, and involve user training.

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Even for non-business delivery technologies such as cloud computing, virtualization, or multi-tiered storage architectures, emerging technologies offer significant value in BI delivery efficiency, agility, and lower total cost of ownership. However, introducing these technologies will also require new policies and procedures for how the BI delivery process will incorporate them. For example, multi-tiered storage is cost effective but requires the creation and definition of data-aging policies by the business for every data element managed across the tiers, with modifications to service-level agreements for performance of data access related to each data storage tier. Emerging technologies fall into several broad categories: enabling new business capabilities, reducing costs or making operations more efficient, or radically changing how you do business. This diligence in articulating the technology’s value helps eliminate the “technology for technology’s sake” unease that the business is usually concerned about. Mistake Three: Not Understanding the Role of Technology in the Ecosystem The more compelling the value of the emerging technology, the more it can be considered acceptable for larger impacts in BI ecosystems. A BI program should have BI capabilities and delivery framework, or at least a sense of it. These frameworks focus on the analysis of categories of technologies to eliminate overlaps of vendors’ products. They help technologists and architects see past the marketing of a product to understand its role in the BI ecosystem and strategy. The framework will also assist in evaluating multiple vendors or products to deliver a specific BI capability when adopting an emerging technology category. BI ecosystems are composed of many technologies that work together and support each other. Within your BI technology framework and technology stack, each emerging technology vendor’s philosophy about BI may cause an “impedance mismatch” with your enterprise’s existing technologies and require extra work to overcome, if possible. When integrating an emerging technology into your BI ecosystem, you’re also integrating the vendor’s philosophy and views about BI into your philosophy. Because of this, single-vendor or BI-suite solutions work well. They have proactively made sure all of their products integrate well and follow a shared overall BI strategy. These “mega vendors,” or partnership ecosystems, also select and acquire start-ups that fit into their overall BI strategy. In the meantime, emerging technologies will most likely be found in new start-ups that still require the same BI ecosystem compatibility that you already have in place. Mistake Four: Adopting an Emerging Technology Because of Marketing Hype The BI industry has great coverage by publications and resources that stay on top of emerging technologies, current trends, and relevant topics. Vendors know that the best way to get their message out is to participate in this coverage. Technologists, architects, and BI managers must learn to read past the marketing and media hype to recognize how particular emerging technologies can offer a unique value proposition for their current business state. Like mainstream news and media, BI industry coverage is always seeking the next hot thing to increase circulation. This is not to say it doesn’t cover relevant topics or offer great editorials and customer stories. The challenge, however, is digesting all this information, filtering out the marketing hype, focusing on how a technology transformed a BI program through new disruptive capabilities, and extracting important and applicable information. Identify the value gained by the emerging technology, then its role and capability within your BI ecosystem. There is a relationship between the capabilities of your current BI systems and where the emerging technology fits into the BI capabilities maturity of your organization. Many companies take on valuable emerging technologies only to fail because it was too far a stretch beyond their current capabilities. Mistake Five: Underestimating the Maturity and Level of Effort Emerging technologies are born out of the spark of innovation and will focus on the core differentiator within a product. Early start-up development teams are usually smaller or come from incubators that focus on a working prototype or product. As a true early adopter recognizing the potential of an emerging

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technology, be prepared for products that contain bugs or are somewhat operationally incomplete. Depending on the stage of the enterprise, few development hours may have been spent on the product for the non-core components such as administration, security, fault-tolerance, or interoperability expected by managed IT organizations. Start-ups learn a great deal from early adopters and implementations, which quickly leads to an improved product. Early customers benefit from specific, requested features being prioritized in development as well as the opportunity for closer working relationships and support. Successful start-ups will continue to grow, and early customers should not be surprised to go from “customer 1” to “customer 100” and get routed to a help desk or trouble ticketing system. Also, expect that successful start-ups could be acquired by a mainstream BI vendor, and the customer-vendor relationship will change yet again. Typically, adopting a new technology will not be the same as purchasing an established product. You should anticipate spending additional hours to deal with issues as the company works with the technology and perfects its solution. You should also expect to have your patience tested with a vendor, and identify up front how long you’re willing to “bleed on the cutting edge” before abandoning the effort, and rightfully so. Mistake Six: Failing to Recognize that Emerging Technology Skills May Be Scarce In most cases, adopting emerging technologies will require some degree of training or new roles to develop and support the implementation of the new technology. These resources may not be readily available in the market for hire, consultation, or contracting, or only be available at a premium. Look internally and plan for roles and resources that may be good candidates for training and development opportunities. You should also check the availability of external training and be familiar with training programs available from the vendor. Some technologies may utilize open standards languages or paradigms while others have proprietary or not-yet-standard languages. When evaluating several vendors and their products, existing internal skill sets must be part of your criteria. For example, Web services development will vary in programming language depending on the cloud service provider. Also, MapReduce programming must be learned as a paradigm for supporting big data and analytics, and the language and implementation may vary by big data vendor. Consider mobile BI, which has the potential for incredible value in most companies but comes with broader IT infrastructure components for data security, app distribution stores, and device connectivity management. Additionally, BI teams will need to develop and understand the new skills and roles needed for user interface design, native app languages, HTML5, performance testing, and possibly data services. Mistake Seven: Not Performing Company Background Due Diligence When you recognize an opportunity to adopt an emerging technology, your next step is to evaluate the companies in the space, or a particular company’s viability and strength. Keep in mind that start-up companies are often at risk of going out of business and may not be around to offer long-term support for their products. This may have nothing to do with the genius behind their emerging technology, but rather a circumstance of the business climate or the ability of their management to execute their business plan. BI teams often take this for granted because they are accustomed to dealing with the well-established market leaders who can afford years of operating losses to launch a successful new product. When evaluating a start-up, some important factors to consider include the executive team’s background and their industry experience, the areas venture capitalists and other investors analyze when deciding where to put their money. A company’s growth and product strategies will be challenged and change over time, and an experienced executive team will know how to navigate this. Also, speak to the investors of the company to learn about their commitment to the company’s vision. Examine pro-forma financial statements to understand how much money a company has and when it will run out based on its current burn rate. These inquiries are not out of bounds and should be taken seriously, as there is significant investment and risk at hand. One of the biggest risks in adopting an emerging technology is investing your time, effort, and capital into a start-up that should have been passed over if important information had been available and analyzed up front.

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Mistake Eight: Failing to Carefully Design a Process for Evaluation and Implementation Evaluating emerging technologies should be an ongoing process for the BI team or IT. This is not a process that should be reinvented each time an opportunity is identified. More important, this process should be continuously improved from the lessons learned with each evaluation and implementation of an emerging technology. Establishing a structured approach and process for evaluating and implementing an emerging technology ensures that evaluations and decisions are made consistently within a continuously improving process. A generalized approach will include resources to monitor for appropriate technologies and trends; trusted research firms and organizations offering independent reviews; a standard value and cost model designed for multi-year total valuation; key milestones in the evaluation process for setting expectations and regulating speed; and a well-defined set of evaluation criteria. Be cautious of industry publications, news, and blogs because many are vendor sponsored and may be misleading and not completely objective. However, not all sponsored materials are a bad thing; those that focus on early customer success stories and case studies are typically the most interesting and relatable. Mistake Nine: Not Planning for Technology Integration and Impact As part of the cost-benefit analysis associated with evaluating an emerging technology, the integration of a new technology into an existing IT technology portfolio should be carefully considered and involve stakeholders across IT. Typically there is a phased approach to implementation before the full value of a new technology is realized. Some emerging technologies lift all of IT and benefit BI, while others have a significant lift in BI alone. This is an important consideration when evaluating new technologies. Some IT organizations are based around efficiently managing technology for the business through standardizations and economies of scale, such as reducing the number of vendors to manage and overlapping products for a given technology. Therefore, new emerging technologies are non-standard, and additional vendors and products introduce new skill sets to manage and configure based on how broad or BI specific the technology. For example, mobile BI is part of a larger mobile strategy that IT would manage; data warehouse appliances or analytic databases would be more BI specific and self supporting. Some technologies may require special configurations with networking, security, or server and storage hardware. There are instances where the emerging technology’s impact and cost outweighs its value. In this case, the technology would have a negative business impact and should not be implemented. Avoiding this scenario is one of the main reasons for identifying truly disruptive technologies that will yield 10x or 100x benefit-to-cost ratios for justification of any IT disruptions. Mistake Ten: Not Balancing New Technology Evaluations with Ongoing Delivery Emerging technologies in BI have been appearing at rates faster than decades past, and the opportunity for companies to leverage them and realize BI value has become an ongoing task. Emerging technologies are exciting and full of possibilities for ongoing BI delivery. To avoid the “shiny object syndrome,” in which BI teams are more inclined to discover the next best thing and neglect solid BI delivery, adopting emerging technologies should be a regular part of the BI process. Considered part of a BI team’s research and development, ongoing monitoring of the BI market, analysis, and research should be part of everyone’s job in the BI team to increase the likelihood of discovery. A small amount of time in key meetings can be dedicated to sharing and discussing the latest discoveries and capturing them for submission. A submission process can be the first step in the emerging technology process, allowing everyone to be involved. A central process such as BI program management, or a key individual such as lead BI/information architect, should be accountable for tracking, categorizing, and following up on individual technology “leads.” It’s important that the submission process of new technologies and products not seem like a black hole. To keep BI research associates motivated, their efforts must be acknowledged. This acknowledgement can be in the form of explanations about why the technology doesn’t fit the strategy, encouragement to follow and keep an eye on a technology, or serious consideration of a submission.

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Finally, it should be either the BI program or a BI lead that sets the criteria for an emerging technology evaluation project and assigns a project manager. This approach will help maintain overall consistency and tracking from a project management perspective for BI. Project plans and resource allocation and assignment ensure smoother evaluations. In some IT and BI organizations, dedicated teams evaluate emerging technologies, and although not required, tracking those evaluations with project management is still a benefit; they will typically require some time from various BI and business roles during some parts of the process. ----John O'Brien, CBIP, is the principal and CEO of Radiant Advisors, and has 25 years of experience delivering value through BI programs. John has diversified experience as an emerging technology adopter, and as the five-year CTO of a venture-capital-backed BI start-up. Today, John provides research, strategic advisory services, and mentoring that guides companies in meeting the demands of next generation information management, architecture, and emerging technologies. Mr. Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien can be reached at john.obrien@radiantadvisors.com.