Why executive participation is so important

Since I started working in 1987 one of the fundamental thing I learned is ' Don't provide a solution until you understand the need'. I used to be a salesman at that time and slowly progressed to sales manager and national sales director.
Over the years it is surprising how SAP implementations still sometimes do not follow this simple guideline. I started with SAP R/3 in 1995 and have since heard it repeated, re-iterated, proposed and discussed how important executive participation is to the success of a ERP project. This is independent whether it be a SAP, APO, CRM or BI project. As I have focused on BI since 1997 I will delve on that aspect of SAP.
most companies erroneously believe that executive participation brings stamina and sustenance. That too but one of the most important aspects executive participation brings is strategic sustenance. The future plans, the future business needs and the future business goals that are integral to the development of all ERP configurations and along with architecture and modeling of the BI environments.
If you are a CEO, CIO, CTO or VP operations your active participation with current business needs, future business plans and strategic business goals can be the difference of success or heading down a road of technical delivery with difficult user and budget discussions as a predictable outcome. Fail to plan = Plan to Fail.

Business cases
In one of my SAP Projects while talking to the CEO and CIO over lunch I was told that this global manufacturing company was planning to invest into their own distribution network by possibly buying out their current small distributors.
I went back reviewed the configuration in R/3 and a couple of weeks later requested that if the company had any possibility of going to distribution then we would need to move from manufacture to order to manufacture to stock. There was also the need to set up new company codes. We extended the project timeline by 3 weeks and 4 months after go live the company did decide to implement their plans. Their ECC and BW was perfectly designed to accommodate such a scenario and the move went very smoothly indeed.

In another company in our weekly meetings the CEO came in unexpectedly and mentioned that they were working with a high tier company that was delivering all their manufacturing reports. he also mentioned in his conversations that the proposed plan was to deliver business content as it met most of the reports. In a subsequent meeting with the CEO I requested permission to review the new BW plans and deliverable's. The CEO offered me a 4 week time to part time work with the group and report back to him after 4 weeks. In two weeks I realized the new team had not talked to any business stakeholders, were planning to deliver metrics as their BI strategy and mostly standard business content. By week three I requested the CEO to arrange a meeting with business owners and we all agreed that the current path would deliver a lot of data but very little information. I was moved from my existing project and made PM for the new implementation where we totally changed path, increased business needs identification, ownership and participation and the outcome was a very smooth and successful BW implementation.

Without executive participation and communications all this would have been an absolute disaster. The failure to plan for direct business needs and for the future in the initial phases can lead to a form of architecture called 'Report marts' - something most best practices would not recommend going to.

Find the Missing Link
In every ERP and/or BW project find the ownership to Business Value Attainment. In the above two examples the reason success was reached is because of executive involvement. There are many stories some of them ending with a simple question "..can we sue the implementing partner..? and none of us want to go anywhere near that path or direction.

One of the critical aspects of all BI strategy is alignment to business goals. We see this missing in most BW implementation, but a few. We have seen many enterprises have.

According to a Gartner report of Feb 209, many multi-billion dollar, multi-nationals companies, have invested million of dollars into BI and potentially not attained their anticipated Business Value from their investments. We call this BVA or Business Value Attainment.

The three things essential for BVA are, [1] Executive participation and communication; [2] BI Value Owner or Architect, and [3] BI Strategy & best practice documentation.

Lessons Learned
1. Executive participation in IT projects creates ownership and visibility within strategic company directives. Just having an executive sponsor is not adequate, it must be leveraged, communicated and utilized.
2. The second most important criteria would be BI Strategy including best practice documentation and communication of it thereof.
3. BI Value Architect is possibly the second most critical component in BI success. In a 8 month research we came out with a clear finding that in current BW projects there is no BI Business Value Owner. No particular individual, or a group, that is directly responsible for ensuring value delivery. Ths person should not belong to any of the triad players, i.e. SW, HW or Implementing partner as that by definition is a conflict position.

Properly engaged senior leadership and executive participation ensures that business takes a leading role in what happens and how BW deliverables are planned. It ensures that technology is used and designed to meet business needs and all tactical decisions are aligned to meet with strategic alignments.