Over the two decades that companies have been designing and implementing business intelligence and data warehousing solutions they have made the same mistakes over and over again.

Who makes these unfortunate mistakes? Newcomers, mostly. But don’t be surprised to see experienced practitioners, who made these mistakes as newcomers, keep making the same mistakes.

Their mistakes span all categories of DW/BI work: architecture, processes, people and politics. The mistakes might not always be unfortunate enough to make projects fail, but they certainly raise the total cost of ownership (TCO), delay projects, slow responsiveness and flexibility for business users and, too often, limit the project’s return on investment (ROI).

Tomorrow’s post will be the first of an ongoing series of posts describing common, unfortunate events that occur in BI projects. You’ve probably seen some of these mistakes, but let’s hope that the people who made them discovered the error of their ways.

With apologies to Lemony Snicket