Relationship management key to successful BI

27.02.2007
Your organization's business intelligence project will fail if the relationship management team lacks political clout or is starved for resources, according to industry analyst firm Gartner Inc.

Speaking at Gartner's BI and Information Management Summit in Sydney Tuesday, senior analyst Rolf Jester said the biggest reasons BI projects fail is the lack of balance between vendor-user trust and control, and loss of predefined goals.

Jester said business must outline project total cost of ownership (TCO) and should build user-vendor interaction into service-level agreements (SLAs) or risk being walked on by vendors.

"Political skills are just as necessary as technical or managerial skills for successful projects," Jester said.

"An equal balance between trust and control needs to be maintained or you will be either walked on by your suppliers or you will get everything you asked for which, without vendor input, may be exactly what you don't want."

"Somewhere between three and 10 percent should be spent on the relationship management team [because] these are the people who will maintain clarity between your external and internal providers and management," he said, adding the biggest point of failure occurs when these areas are insufficiently funded.