Hard or Soft Business Case for a Data Warehouse

Which business cases succeed in today’s hard-nosed business environment? Business cases for Business Intelligence and Data Warehouses have always been hard to quantify.

I don’t know if you’ve tried but trying to get business sign-off on benefits with an accounting level of rigor is either impossible or takes considerable time working over the details.  It may be an essential management tool, but can you honestly say how much money a dashboard will save you?

There are two ways of solving this dilemma. 

The first is the soft business case which argues that information is a good thing, and business learning will come from the availability of data itself with some indicative benefits. The financial benefits are not ones that an accountant would ever sign-off as accurate or precise. In some organisations this may be acceptable but if the case involves a data warehouse/lake, the scale of the investment often makes it hard to justify.  There is a danger you will end up going round in circles trying to make the case stack-up.

The second is the hard business case.  The data warehouse is not justified on its own – it is identified as part of a larger initiative that needs data or improved data analytics.  We could say that the initiative needs the investment and that it would suffer or fail without it. The cost of improving analytics would be covered comfortably by the business case for that larger initiative at the expense of focusing work on that initiative as a priority.

We have seen both approaches attempted and prefer the hard business case approach. This makes it easier to answer the question why are we doing this? Interestingly even once approved – this can be important. Should the project hit challenges, as most IT projects do at some point, the soft business case is more likely to be curtailed or cancelled as it struggles against the question – do we really need to be doing this? The hard business case project has clearer outcomes and any re-evaluation is made against required results, making it stronger under scrutiny.

What is your experience?  Have you found it easier to do the hard business case or the soft business case?  Does agile make it more difficult?  Are there tips for success in producing business cases?

We are presenting what we have learnt from many years working on business cases in this space, at the UK Data Vault User Group in London on 28th March 2019.  Why not come and join the discussion in an informal environment? Click here to join us.