Insights

Emma Moss

BI Solutions Lead, Bluefin Solutions

Driving BI user adoption - WYSIWYG is dead! Long live collaboration!

"What you see is what you get", or WYSIWYG, was a phrase bandied around at the beginning of my IS career some 10 years ago.  Often used by "the old hands", it served two purposes - to thoroughly confuse the new intake, but, more importantly, it largely described IT's prevailing approach to user adoption. 

Back in the day, the average business user was still grappling with green screens, tab buttons, and the advent of their first mobile phone.  For many BI users, the spreadsheet was a kingdom just starting to unfold (more on the xls Kingdom in a future blog).  For the average business user making sense of the digital world was an accepted workday challenge.  Meanwhile Stereotypes of geeky, uncommunicative IT whizzkids with all their new fangled, frankly incomprehensible coding languages were alive and well, prowling a datawarehouse near you.

Fast forward 15 years and the world is a breathtakingly different place.  The boundaries have blurred to say the least, so has the territory and the roles.  This is now a digital world, and critically for BI professionals, much of the up and coming workforce are now "digital natives" and many of the key decision makers, or at least influencers, are locked in "digital immigrants" (1).  This new breed of business users are not only comfortable with technology, they expect to use it across all facets of their working day.  Consequently, more and more the business are seeing IT very much as an enabler, rather than a blocker.  

In this brave new world the old IT department's WYSIWYG approach of doing things TO the business is inappropriate (not that it ever really was!).  Nowadays savvy business users want to work WITH IT.  This shift is particularly important in the area of BI.

Having users use the BI system is frankly the number 1 critical success factor for any BI implementation.  Below is one of the ways you can help achieve this.

As all BI professionals know, defining reporting requirements using the traditional waterfall techniques is notoriously difficult.  This is because BI reports are not process based, unlike ERP implementations.  For ERP it is relatively straightforward to map out a Purchase To Pay process, document it, develop it, test and deploy.  However, for BI, user requirements are varied.  They may wish to analyse the profitability of a service line, understand basket affinity or even anticipate ad hoc board level requests.  For the average BI user, and BI developer, such requirements are very difficult to conceptualise, and all too often a BI project simply replicates the creaking, as is reporting suite.

A solution to this is to change approach, and to work in partnership with the business.  This collaboration works well when developing a POC system, allowing the business to articulate what is they want, and the BI team to produce what they think they heard (let's be honest).  The first pass is usually a 'starter for 10' and keys to success are collaboration and iteration.  Misunderstandings are ironed out early, the business gain an appreciation of the 'art of the possible', costly rework is front loaded and it helps a partnership grow between the Business and BI teams.  However, one of the key gains is from a user adoption perspective is that users will form a heightened sense of ownership of a system when they have had the opportunity to influence the design.

Remember, having users use the BI system is the number 1 critical success factor for any BI implementation.  I'm still dreaming up an acronym for this kind collaborative and iterative approach, WYSIWYG was catchy, but it's had its day.

(1) Marc Prensky; 2001; On the Horizon