Finding your shining star

Dear readers, happy New Year 2013! I hope you have a prosperous year and all your Business Intelligence implementations are wildly successful. For my first blog of the year, I truly debated what to write about, many thoughts came to mind including wishes, resolutions and stars. Before you write off this blog as another piece of internet fallacy, let me connect the dots, you will be glad that you gave it a chance.

If you remember my last entry, it talked about achieving success and chartering your next endeavor by truly defining yourself. As my good friend Sigmund would say:  “one cannot define oneself in isolation, as we exist in relation to others”. Have you ever wondered why Bill Gates left Microsoft to focus on his charity work? History proves that there is only so much a person can achieve by amassing large amounts of money; at the end of the day we all feel the need to realize ourselves by helping others. True, this urge is mostly ignored and superseded by our daily routines but no human can achieve a full realization of the self without tending to it.

 Ok, I promised that this blog would lead to something and so I am getting to it. A successful BI implementation needs to focus on helping someone in the organization fulfill their needs. As simple as this conclusion reads, the great majority of Business Intelligence projects set out with a bang trying to install the latest platform, consolidate the most amount of data, demonstrate to the organization who has the information, etc. In other words, very self-centered goals around the project team or immediate sponsor.

In order for a project to be not only successful, but to transcend it must really fulfill a selfless destiny that will have a “social” impact. This impact would be felt within the organization helping a group/department to be leaner and more productive. More importantly, the project should also create an impact outside of the organization delivering value: a better customer service, and/or better products & services for the customers. Then and only then the project will have accomplished its corporate and social missions, literally making the world a better place.

If you made it this far, you definitively gave this blog a chance. I ask you to do the same with this philosophy, let the “shining start show you the way”. The next time you define a project, start with challenging the project team to look beyond the “corporate” goals and think how your project will impact team members, your internal clients, and your company customers. Establish a link between what you are delivering and the wellbeing of the larger group of stakeholders.  Once you have established this link you will realize that the team will approach the project with a different perspective, fully propelling each team member to give their best, knowing that by doing so it will make a tangible difference in the lives of people around them.