IT executives implementing data warehousing and business intelligence applications expect a failure in four of every 10 projects, a recently released study says.
A survey released by the Cutter Consortium, an IT analysis firm, says as many as 41 per cent of data-warehousing projects fail because they don’t meet the business objectives of the company or because they ignore what users really need out of a data-warehousing application.
“There is no one reason for data-warehousing project failure,” says Cliff Hall, an analyst for the Cutter Consortium. “You
see a culmination of things: customers don’t meet end-user expectations, they don’t have a clear view of the business problem they want to use the data warehouse for, and there are issues where the quality of the data
is debatable.”
Using the information in a data warehouse effectively is big business. IDC estimates that revenue from servicing CRM applications will increase at a compound annual growth rate of 25 per cent from US$61 billion in 2001 to $148 billion in 2005.
Hall says that companies are uneasy about implementing data-warehousing technology. Only 25 per cent of the customers surveyed said they felt comfortable with data warehousing and 38 per cent of the companies have brought in outside consultants to steer a stalled project back on track.
