I have seen large organizations fail with providing successful BI services. Often the blame is on the quality of service that was provided in terms of people and technology. But dig deeper and you will see that a lack of cohesive focus is where that organization would have lost the impetus in providing the service.

One may ask what is cohesive focus. When you deal with a large organization, there are multiple processes and teams involved. There is bound to be different levels of maturity amongst the teams and this gap leads to lack of clarity and hence the lack of cohesive focus.

What are the signs of lack of focus? the warning signs will start when you see an alignment issue between the different managers in the team. The earliest warning will be when a single point of contact cannot be deployed to the project. When these signs manifest, I urge both the service provider and the customer organization to start working together at the earliest to mitigate downstream issues.  Often the damage is done by the time either organization realizes the situation.

When service providers decide to engage in program services, one word of advise, ensure that your organization is having checks and balances to avoid surprises. If you lack the desired level of maturity, ensure that you do not oversell the client expectations. Another food for thought is to develop a mutually agreed scorecard to monitor and correct course over the period of service.

No analyst organization will provide a course on how not to fail. But if you are too large or too small an organization, watch out for the lack of cohesive focus, which is your achilles heel.

Remember since this is a competitive domain, there will be no sharing of best practices or approaches. Learning from introspection is the best approach.