"The best and most successful business intelligence and IT projects I have seen have all used a tough love approach. You can make it easier by providing training on user terms, but [ultimately] they need to be held accountable for having done the training and should be forced to," he said, suggesting the creation of an in-house BI competency center.

It is very important the business has a BI cycle and when a solution is deployed that there is a handover to the business. It is also important that a business person is made responsible for using that data which means some tasks would be done differently, Elliot said.

"At the end of a three- or six-month period [business] should then be required to approach their boss and say because the IT organization made this information available to me, this is what I am doing differently."

Beth Phillips, ING Insurance internal software specialist, said joint ownership of the project between business and IT is critical.

"Our finance department was responsible for developing the dashboard, but we bought in external consultants to analyze the data requirements and identify key performance indicators (KPI) to ensure it aligned with business needs," she said.