Over more than 30 years, Dynamic Business Informatics’ (DBI’s) team of data specialists have amassed an enormous amount of knowledge and expertise in designing, developing, and supporting business intelligence and data analytics applications for their many customers. These are in a variety of industry sectors, including Retail, Distribution, Pharma, Waste Disposal, Food Service, Packaging and Transport.
We thought it would be a great source of information if we asked some members of the team to share their most valuable insights about various topics related to their experiences in the field.
1. Our first topic “In Our Experience” is: Pitfalls to Avoid in BI & Data Analytics Projects.
(Part 1 – the first 5 team responses )
As it’s the first blog post in this series we also asked them all to add what they enjoy most about their jobs working as consultants to the DBI client base.
Here are the first 5 responses – more pitfalls for you to watch out for will follow soon!
1. John Spillane (Technical Director DBI)
After working long term in this field at a customer site, gaining direct experience from a customer’s perspective in the dairy sector, it came as a new challenge to apply my skills to a wider range of industries when I joined up with Bob at DBI. I really enjoy creating new applications that require a lot of technical expertise in the background, but that make things much simpler for my customers and save them time and money. Creating a new application that is portable and reusable is key to my design ethic, and using in-house standards also makes support and understanding by colleagues much easier and more efficient.
As for the pitfalls in BI – it’s so easy to fall into them when you’re starting out and don’t have the luxury of already having learnt by them. So I suppose you can learn by ours! One pitfall that I try to avoid is failing to plan for scalability. If you don’t take into account the potential growth of a business, you might have to start from scratch again if you don’t design your applications to allow for increased data volumes or new data sources. We tend to parameterise all our scripts and project structures so that we can seamlessly add in new stores to a chain of retail outlets for example or integrate data from different backend systems that we haven’t seen before. Planning and design are at the heart of all successful implementations.
2. Anthony Wright (Senior BI Consultant DBI)
I’ve been working with DBI since I left university over 16 years ago, and so although I have a solid grounding in a number of other IT skills, my main focus has always been Business Intelligence and Data Analytics. It’s second nature to me now after having worked on so many different projects for some very high-profile customers. I find that enjoyment comes from being able to get to the heart of data issues and solve problems relating to the way data is held, for example in a customer’s ERP system – when it’s required by the business in a completely different way. It’s rewarding when we can transform data into a new or different format that’s accessible to more people within a business, who need to use it to achieve their goals.
My contribution to help avoid common pitfalls is to make sure that customers fully understand when their data is not of good quality, as it can lead to inaccurate insights, and to advise them on how they can improve this. Most good BI systems can actually help shine a light on poor data quality and deliver lists of exceptions that need to be fixed in the main system. Only then can you rely on the insights and data discovery that you hope to gain from a BI application.
3. Olatz Iturbe (Senior BI Consultant DBI)
I started working with DBI over 17 years ago when I was living in Dublin, and quickly became a specialist in report writing and training users on the Diver front end software. After a brief break when I first returned to live in my home country, The Basque Country, Spain, I picked up with DBI again to work on more complex data visualisation and data delivery projects, as well as continuing in my role as trainer. I enjoy all aspects of working with users, helping them to get the best out of the Diver tools and also delivering their data in the most useful formats for the type of data they have.
The main pitfall that I see frequently is when a dashboard is too busy with too much information, and this makes it really difficult to get the most useful insights. We try to guide users into reducing rather than increasing what is presented on each page, as this highlights their key metrics and helps them make well-informed decisions. Every case is different and sometimes more is better, but as a general rule, focus is preferable.
4. Debbie Lonsdale (Senior BI Consultant DBI)
Having had quite a variety of roles in areas as varied as sales, marketing, COBOL programming and account management, when discovering the new capabilities of BI software over 16 years ago after joining DBI, I was excited to find that I could slot back into a more technical role which I really enjoyed. Over the years the role has become both easier and more challenging – easier because the Diver software has become more flexible and can manage more data, and more challenging as the suite of offerings is growing so fast that there is always something new to learn and try out. I most enjoy the speed and ease at which I can now turn around a request from a user and give them what they need, which gives me great job satisfaction.
One area that gives me pause is when occasionally some users don’t take enough care about data security and want to share user accounts and passwords. This is not good practice and can open a business up to some pretty nasty outcomes – plus it doesn’t please the auditors. Thankfully our systems have great access control and logging options, but you can’t police in-house negligence even when you have the tightest security.
5. Jer Colbert (BI Consultant DBI)
I’ve a long history of working with BI and Diver applications. My career has been in the Agri-Business in Ireland, working for one of Diver’s first customers. I’ve been a COBOL and RPG programmer, as well as a Business Support Analyst on Oracle systems in the Branch Sales, Mill and Milk sectors. Joining DBI with this background and having had over 500 colleagues using Diver in the past, I have a great appreciation for how the product has changed over the years. I enjoy working with the latest iterations of the software and supporting users with their queries, as well as helping to fine tune some of our newer applications.
As I work closely with end users and their queries, it’s clear to me that overlooking good training and support of a new BI implementation is false economy, and devoting specialist support staff to this role is key to ensuring the success of a rollout. In addition, in my experience many users do not like change, so this resistance can hinder adoption of a new system. It’s key to step in and answer any queries straight away that might have arisen due to a lack of training.
Next time we cover 5 more pitfalls – and hear from DBI’s Bob Corr, Lorenzo Lumanlan, Paul Duggan, YY Tsang and James Grace.
