I was recently involved in a Business Intelligence (BI) assignment wherein we were pitching power of BI to a customer. We did couple of weeks of consulting (mostly interviewing customer to understand systems, processes and their pain areas) and built a POC to demo our power of product and implementation cum consulting capabilities. This was first BI assignment for me and felt the need to document few leaning that I have had in last few months.
BI market is highly competitive with plethora of BI tools from MS BI, IBM Cognos to SAP BO and many others. Hence, in a deal on BI is going to be competitive with different product vendors and partners making an aggressive stance to sell product and their implementation capabilities to customer. Hence, never take a BI deal lightly.
Customers are quite aware of BI and mature in terms of their expectations. They don’t talk about basic features anymore. They might be looking for standard Dashboards to start with but go all the way to convince you that they looking for fancy and stuff from in memory analytics to Dashboards working on Android Mobile phones.
Never only build scenarios or dig KPIs from past experience or domain understanding. Always request to play around with various source data (transactional, master etc) to understand the relationship and how scenarios, KPIs etc could be effectively built from it.
Always keep Datawarehosuing expert in your team: He will be key to map relationships, perform very important ETL activity. He will be the one to provide solid foundation for analytics project to follow. Customer feels comfortable if you demonstrate what you can do with BI tool using real data. Always request customer to provide you with real data.
If you are building a Proof of concept (POC) which typically is the case these days, always work in an iterative model. The first output will never be perfect so never try to make it perfect. Share and showcase some of portions of POC as early as possible to ensure that customer appreciates your work and give important insights of its business and make the your output more meaningful.
POCs are typically nobody’s baby. A Customer more often than not doesn’t care whether he pays for the it. Neither do the internal organization where resources are deployed on live, Rupee/dollar generating projects. So it is important that only those resources are carefully put on such short assignments who have capability to deliver fast and who could be effectively channelized to create an impactful showcase.
Convince customers to pay for POC: It is always good to get some money from pocket of customer. This will ensure that customer is keenly involved in responding to presales and POC activities. See a sea change in terms of how a POC develops once customer shells out few bucks.
Never hurry in jumping to create or deliver a BI solution. It is extremely important that important set of KPIs from mountain of not so useful KPIs are selected. Build scenarios carefully of how would you dig into a business problem and find a root cause of it; suggest possible solutions which a decision maker can rely on.
and Finally, Involve the product vendor early on as he would be most eager to sell a product license to your customer. Hence leverage their infrastructure, ideas and resources to build an invincible story which customer can trust and feel confident about.
image:http://www.enterprise-dashboard.com/2007/08/06/george-bush-on-business-intelligence/
