My friend Jamie Menashi, a professional services consulting, project and account manager in the BI/analytics space for a decade or so, made me a cup of strong french press coffee the other day, and then launched into an insightful diatribe about failed BI/analytics projects.  Rumors of all kinds of less than successful big data projects have surfaced, but this isn’t news to Jamie; Jamie has been on point for BI/analytics professional services for countless projects, with a focus on financial services, and he has seen the good and the bad countless times.  Jamie offered up 3 primary reasons why such projects fail, and here is the first reason, the rest will be unveiled in a subsequent post.

Does anyone really know why we did this project?  In this scenario the value of a BI/analytics project is not well defined up front with the stakeholders.  High-value BI/analytics projects drive behavior that…