Sometimes you can have 'too much of a good thing.'  BI is no exception.  One of the common mistakes I see in BI implementations is that not enough thought is given as to who specifically is using the BI, and what specifically they will do with it.  One of the symptoms of this is that organizations take a 'drink from  the firehose' approach to BI, where they inundate their end users with analytics/reports/dashboards indiscrimately regardless of who the end users are.  Some might claim that they are making it 'user specific' by filtering the data based on what a specific user rights are (I only see the data I'm allowed to see) but in reality a report that is meaningless to me, is meaningless to me whether it's got the right security on it or not.

What ends up happening when end users are bombarded with BI that is irrelevant to their role, is that they begin to tune it out.  As a result even BI that would help them do their jobs is lost among the noise of the irrelevant BI.

The way to combat this is to take a role centric approach to BI.  That starts with understanding who your end users are, what specific information they need to do their jobs, and what decisions they will make with this information.  I will talk about the persona based approach to BI in much more detail in a future article, but for now the key takeaway is that if you want to combat low adoption of BI in your organization, take a hard look at how role tailored your BI is today, and if it's generic (one size fits all) then making it specific to each role is where you should start.