The implementation of business intelligent (BI) systems, which is IT based system, is faced with several challenges in companies. Even though these systems can offer companies a lot of insights regarding, the operations of businesses, they are hard to implement, in my opinion. In many cases, the implementation is faced with resistance by employees. Change administration associated matters have, in addition, been pinpointed as the major grounds of failure in system implementation. This has been found to be, specifically, factual for firms belonging to Chinese investors, where cultural gradation like personal or individual issues are viewed as influential obstacles to the sharing of intelligence. It has also been reported how The Chinese chief executive officers (CEOs) do have the capability of overpowering these preventive or limiting forces in order to make easy the achievement of implementation. In the midst of all these issues, there is also sufficient evidence that strong, dedicated together with adaptive leadership approach offers foundation for efficient business intelligence utilization. In addition, there are also tactical as well as strategic measures that Chinese chief executive officers can employ to promote information sharing tradition that is favorable to BI system realization (Seah, Hsieh & Weng, 2010).
Almost each company irrespective of their size experiences the pain on multiple versions of truth, the incapability to perform deep analysis and failure to locate crucial information. Other challenges suffered by these same companies during BI system implementation are the inability to make a distinction and give priority to problems, questions of data governance and non-conformity of functions with planned goals. There is also a belief that middle sized companies do not have the capacity to manage business intelligence. A number of middle-sized and small companies, with insufficient resources, are extra liable towards complete, cheap applications, which are easy to administer and fast to deploy. This poses an enormous challenge to such companies when it comes to questions of BI system implementation since they might not afford an all inclusive and more valuable system which is expensive in terms of cost (Abhinav & Varatharajan, 2011).
It should be noted that BI is all about turning information into actions, and actions into enhanced performance. However, technical initiatives pay attention only on data which have tended to fall short in supporting business objectives and enhancing performance. The principle obstacles to BI-driven performance enhancement are lack of business vision in to how BI can drive performance. Also, there is lack of will to drive the process changes that are needed by BI. Furthermore, not many managers are literate in terms of information. The majority of managers do know how to obtain data although they still have to learn how to use those data (Williams & Williams, 2010).
The management of change as it appears to BI initiatives also has not been developed yet in to an orderly body of knowledge. A good number of BI projects that do fail can, therefore, be associated to ineffective change management. These failures point to a problem that is shared within the BI industry. This issue is that of overstating the ease at which BI application system can be deployed and accepted in organizations. The overstatements, which in the real sense are not practical in most cases, are done by ERP vendors with packaged data warehouses, by BI vendors having packaged analytics, by consultants or IT professionals. Another challenge is that most organizations are still in the early stages of use of the potential of BI. This again presents a risk though with an opportunity besides it. The risk is that organizations will not do the process re-engineering, and change management that are needed for utilizing BI to achieve business worth. Achieving of business value depends on professional judgments that organizations will benefit from the rigorous process of engineering approach. The opportunity is that the effective use of BI can deliver reasonable profit and high performance (Williams & Williams, 2010).
Besides the provision of structure, automation and process standardization for managing everyday dealings by enterprise applications such as ERP, SCM and CRM, organizations effort to employ BI techniques are more unstructured. In addition, their approaches are more ad hoc and less widely used. An excellent example is the use of optimization tools for all levels of management supply chain planning. This process has gone up over the past several years. However, it is still not widely practiced and more so, has slowed down over the past few years. Other examples include companies which are still in their early stages of adopting the approaches such as collaborative filtering and clustering to enhance campaign performance for sales (Williams & Williams, 2010). It is, therefore, in my view that complete and effective implementation of BI system is not possible as long as these challenges continue to exist.
References
Seah, M., Hsieh, M. H., & Weng, P. D. (2010). A case analysis of Savecom: The role of indigenous leadership in implementing a business intelligence system. International journal of information management, 30(4), 368-373.
Abhinav Abhinav& Manoj Kumar Varatharajan. (2011). BI in Small and Mid-size Companies.datavibes. Retrieved on 30th May 2014, from
http://kpisrus.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/bi-in-small-and-mid-size-companies/
Williams, S., & Williams, N. (2010). The profit impact of business intelligence. Morgan Kaufmann.
