Business Analytics obstacles remain

Any effort to introduce a new category of software more complex than a desktop notepad faces vectors of organizational resistance and technical hurdles. BA is no different. Although the returns can be astronomical, the barriers are just as high as any other project. The most common barriers include the following.

Legacy Orientation

Upper management has a proclivity for seat-of-the-pants decision-making and a reliance on the legacy approach of eyeballing and historically based guesses. In the classic business dichotomy of science vs. seat-of-the-pants, seat-of-the-pants usually wins.

Fear of the unknown BA calculations and processes aren’t “transparent” and some fear what they don’t understand. The usual resistance-to-change factors will appear: fear of losing legacy reports, not wanting to learn new programs, fear about losing jobs.

Data Preparation

Preparing data for most BA clients requires some conversion, such as from text fields to numeric fields, and some of this requires manual triggering of search-and-replace routines. Some products can take a stream of data directly from a data warehouse, but many others require a proprietary data store for data prepared for the BA work.

Data Sanitation

Data cleanliness is always a serious issue, but it’s much more critical when you’re making decisions that can appear to be not “transparent” based on the data.

IT resources Many organizations don’t have staff with statistical/domain expertise. Hard-math analysts and pattern-recognition statisticians have always been relatively sparse, but five years of layoff trends have exacerbated the imbalance.