EC Integrators Blog Single view initiatives - how to achieve optimum business involvement?

The Data Warehouse Institute (TDWI) has published statistics showing that over 90% of failed Business Intelligence projects (BI) result from a lack of business involvement. In fact, this is true not only for BI, but for any single view organisational initiatives such as Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) and Master Data Management (MDM).Like Business Intelligence projects, the cross-system, cross-business unit nature of EDW and MDM initiatives make it extremely challenging to involve stakeholders and keep them actively engaged throughout the course of the project.How then do you successfully promote active business involvement for these initiatives?This can be summarised in three key steps:1. Identify your business stakeholdersInvest the time to identify your business stakeholders. Business stakeholders are the users from the organisation's business community who have the authority to ascertain and prioritise the relevant business requirements for these initiatives. Engage a business champion, the stakeholder with the political will for the initiative, who will drive the change with you.2. Truly understand their business goalsStart the initiative by making a determined effort to truly understand the business needs and concerns leveraging on the business community's knowledge and expertise. This can be achieved through conducting weekly 'inclusive' discussions with your business users through simple whiteboard tactics.3. Continuously work with your business stakeholdersInclude your business stakeholders at all times. It is particularly critical to engage them during the design and development of the key foundation for these initiatives. For BI, this is the underlying EDW Logical Data Model and for MDM, this is the unified master data asset. By keeping the right authorities involved, you create a sense of shared ownership which can only yield positive results for the initiative. But, in any case, getting stakeholders to be involved in a project is difficult if it is not your area of expertise. The key is to engage a specialist who can give you and your stakeholders clarity on the project.This is why EC Integrators' comprehensive end-to-end approach starts with a business discovery, to uncover the business needs with your stakeholders, to maximise their buy-in. This is then followed by a technical discovery which guides the strategic solution roadmap. To understand how we can help you implement a single view initiative with buy-in from your stakeholders, email us now.