Week 3 Notes

Lecture Objectives:

• Understand the key issues related to five case studies of Australia BI system.
• Be able to identify some of the key factors that can lead to the failure or the success of a BI system.

Keen's Adaptive Development Model

Overall Key Issues and Conclusions of Cases

• Cost/Benefit Analysis - this needs to be done for the BI system that is going to be implement to see the feasibility
• Evolution - the development strategy needs to be evolutionary, inline with the evolutionary application and function nature of BI applications.
• Data and Data Management - the data and the way it is managed is critical to the success of the BI system, and the infrastructure needs to be flexible.
• Profit Impact - the BI system can make a significant difference, however it depends on the organization how much profit the system can provide them. BI systems have very short spans of being relevant, after which the highly variant business/organizations change, and the BI system need to be adapted along the way.
• Cost - need to consider the transaction costs, more than the operational cost of the BI system, considering its not about fixing problems and bugs, but more about a living breathing system, which has both functional and application evolution going on, as per the demands of the users.
• Project Manager - needs to have experience in handling BI related projects, and also have very good technical, business, creative, and interpersonal skills, and should know how executives think and work.
• Development team - the team needs to be good in development/programming/tools in general, however, its very important for them to be experienced in the BI environment, plus they should have good business sense, and data organization skills.
• Politics  - need to be put aside for actual work to continue.
• Contracts - should be loosely set to allow evolutionary development
• Feedback - developers mainly complain that users don't provide feedback, which hinders BI application success
• Commitment from SMs - is a very important CSF
• Usage - the users are generally convinced about the benefits, however, there is still a lack of actual usage of the system due to lack of trust in the system.
• System and Data Ownership -  considered a very good practice to separate these two.
• Testing - generally developers avoid rigorous testing, which causes issues later on.