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MM: In large part, Mike, they fail for—I think—several reasons. One—the production data sources have data that’s somehow compromised or incomplete. Therefore, it requires a tremendous amount of reconditioning to make them usable, so companies can upload them into a data warehouse. Or—two—you simply have incompatible datasets from one system to another. And then I would suspect that there are probably some organizational issues around control of data, and therefore the difficulty of accessing various legacy or enterprise data sources. Does that sound about right?

MB: I would agree that the three things you’ve outlined are some of the factors why BI projects fail. I think that certainly there’s a data quality issue, which was the first issue you’ve raised. That’s still there, although with ERP packages that issue is lessened—but certainly is not gone. Companies still have ERP systems in addition to other point-solution systems, and large companies have multiple ERP systems. So they have the problem of reconciling them. But at least within any one system, there’s a sense of completeness of the information. There is still the issue of compatibility when you operate with multiple ERP systems.

There are problems that companies get into with master data management. They’ve got multiple ERP systems, and they have the same part or customer represented in several of them. And they don’t actually have them identified in the same way, which they don’t realize—and so forth. Those are significant problems in large enterprises.

This master data problem is one of the bigger challenges. At Oco, our key competency is reconciling data from multiple systems to address this problem.

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