The expensive data lake that no one uses
Imagine the classic scenario. A team of data architects plans a modern cloud data lake, draws integrations on whiteboards, and contracts consultants. Eighteen months and several tens of thousands of euros later, the dashboards are live... but sales managers are still downloading raw CSVs to craft their own truth into Excel. The project is “technically successful” and no one dares use the word failure, but the decision quality remains the same.
According to Gartner, nearly a third of all BI projects fail within two years because users simply don't see value in them.¹ The pain point is never the tool; it's the lack of a business owner to keep asking why. That's exactly where the CFO has a natural mandate.
Four reasons why the CFO should take the wheel
From back office to boardroom — business first, tech second
The CFO has both feet in the reality of margin pressure, supply chain hiccups, and shareholder expectations. He or she does not see BI as a “fancy visualization”, but as a decision enhancer. So let business users first formulate what insights they need to achieve their targets. Only then do data specialists determine how these insights are technically created. Where this order is reversed, expensive platforms with dashboards that lack the daily rhythm of the business are created.
Business Intelligence fails as soon as technology determines what the business can still see
Challenge each supplier with the question, “How does this report increase my margin by one percentage point?” Technology that doesn't have an answer to that doesn't even belong on the longlist.
ROI guard and budget holder
Financial directors are trained to link euros to outcomes. A CFO who promotes BI requires a business case per user story and examines the realization quarterly. As a result, the dialogue is moving from “we need a data platform” to ”how much extra EBIT does this screen provide?” It prevents “shelfware” and encourages iterative releases with measurable value.
An additional advantage: as soon as Finance approves the investment, the vague language disappears. “Time‑to‑insight” becomes a KPI alongside “time‑to-cash”. Teams know exactly what numbers they need to move to secure their next quarter budget.
Cross-functional view of data silos
Finance is the only department that sees every order, invoice and payroll run pass. This 360° view makes it easy to uncover inconsistencies — think customer names that differ in CRM and ERP, or inventory values that don't match the ledger entries. The CFO acts as data traffic manager: what needs to be cleaned up first, which definitions become standard?
Data specialists then provide the pipelines and security, but the priorities are dictated by Finance, because erroneous figures immediately translate into the wrong P&L. Governance thus becomes not a bureaucratic block, but pure self-protection.
Culture and data literacy
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” said Peter Drucker. He could just as well have said “technology”. McKinsey calculated that 80% of stuck BI processes are due to behavior, not tooling.² A CFO who demonstratively replaces his static PDF with a live dashboard during the monthly meeting sends an unmistakable signal: this is how we decide from now on.
The effect is more viral than any change campaign. Managers dare to ask questions about data definitions, do their own analyses in user-friendly dashboards and mirror their actions to real-time KPIs.
Away from the technology dictation
If you're reading this, you might expect a battle between Finance and IT. This is not necessary, but it is essential that BI decisions no longer start from a tool or a stack. Deciding on tooling before it's clear what business problem you're solving is the opposite world. BI fails not because the software is bad, but because no one asked beforehand: Which decision do I want to make faster or better? That question belongs to the CFO, to Sales, to Operations — in short, to the business.
Data teams may shine in execution, but they don't set the course. Tools become a tool, never the topic of conversation.
Call‑to-action: make BI a business competency
- CFOs: Claim the BI mandate. Demand the same ROI discipline as a new production line. Embed data quality and definitions into your Financial Control framework.
- Business leaders: First formulate the usage scenario, decide what you want to get out of it.
- Data & Analytics teams: Speak P&L instead of ETL. Help the business test hypotheses with a simple approach that takes weeks, not years.
- CEOs & Boards of Directors: Measure BI initiatives not by implementation milestones but by decision quality. Ask each quarterly meeting: “What insights did we not know three months ago — and what financial effect did they have?”
Epilogue: Beyond the IT Project
History repeats itself. The ERP booms of the 90s, the CRM booms that followed: technical solutions were always the promise, only to realize years later that user adoption, process redrawing and cultural acceptance were the real deal. Business Intelligence is at the same crossroads.
So give the reins firmly to the functional owners of value creation — the CFO in the lead. Those who speak the language of money ultimately speak the language of every decision-maker in the company. And let that be the difference between dashboards that gather dust and insights that generate profit.
Do you want to know how InsightData, from the business, can help you with insights that make money? Get in touch today.
¹ Gartner, “Why Analytics and BI Projects Fail,” 2023.
² McKinsey Global Survey, “Overcoming the cultural barriers to data-driven decision-making,” 2024.
