Can your Business Intelligence team be too good for your organisation ?

[Leigh Kennedy]

Firstly, I don't think for a second I am too good, but I suspect my team is 'too good' for our organisation.

What do I mean by this ? We have been quite a successful business intelligence team delivering to various areas of the business for the last couple of years so when management decided to put in a new multi-million dollar billing system we were brought in from the start to integrate this into out BI world.

And here is where things started to go wrong. Because we have more experience and skill in extracting data from our various systems, we were quickly roped into the data extraction, cleansing and migration tasks. Because the application vendor was too expensive in developing interfaces to our other systems and to external organisations, these became deliverables of the data warehouse. It has ended up that we are now responsible for 75% of technical tasks on the implementation of this new billing system.

Now we are receiving a lot of praise and thanks from management, but we no longer have capacity to cover the BI work we had planned for this financial year. Our people are getting frustrated and we are starting to lose staff.

The billing system still has another 3-6 months of work to complete (not counting any BAU tasks we may be left with at the end) and most of our team are out of patience.

I have tried to think of ways we can get out of this and back to our core area, but short of us screwing op royally (which we would never do intentionally) I can't see how we can convince management to let us return to our core area.

Any ideas ? Have you been in this situation and what did you do about it ?


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