Picture a mid-sized manufacturing company in Turkey. The finance manager spends months pushing for a project to pull sales, inventory, and cost data into a single reporting system. A technical team is assembled, a consultant is brought in, meetings are held. Six months later, the project is dead. The sales director refused to share his numbers. The production manager insisted the system would misrepresent his department’s figures. And there was nobody with the authority to settle the argument. The project did not die from a technical failure. It died from internal politics.
Business intelligence, or BI, refers to software systems that collect data from different parts of a company and turn it into reports that management can actually use. A data warehouse is the foundation underneath: a central repository where figures from different programs — sales, stock, payroll, purchasing — are brought together and made queryable. This sounds like a technical challenge, and in part it is. But the harder challenge is this: whose data counts as correct, who gets to see what, and who decides when two departments report conflicting numbers?
In Turkish small and medium-sized businesses, this problem is especially sharp. Every department keeps its own Excel file, its own notebook. Finance reports one revenue figure, sales reports another. Both insist they are right. When you try to build a data warehouse on top of this, the first obstacle is not servers or software. It is the department manager who says: ‘my data does not mix with yours.’ A technical team or an outside consultant cannot resolve that conflict. Only someone at the top of the company can.
This is why BI projects need what practitioners call an ‘executive sponsor.’ The sponsor is not simply the person who signs the budget. The sponsor is the senior manager who settles data ownership disputes, breaks through departmental resistance, and clears the bureaucratic obstacles that block progress. In practice, this might be the general manager, the CFO, or a board member. The title matters less than the actual decision-making power. A BI project launched without a genuine sponsor will stall at the first serious conflict between departments — and there will always be a first serious conflict.
There are specific moments when the sponsor must step in. At the project’s start, the sponsor announces which departments will contribute which data and makes clear that participation is not optional. When a department later refuses to share access, the sponsor intervenes and resolves it. When the first reports are produced and two departments show conflicting figures, the sponsor decides which definition of the metric is authoritative. Without these decisions, the project enters an endless loop of meetings where nothing moves forward. The technical team runs from room to room, and the data warehouse never gets built.
The practical difficulty in many Turkish companies is that the general manager — or the owner, in family-run businesses — tends to see this kind of project as ‘something for IT to handle.’ The attitude is: ‘sort it out and show me the results.’ This is understandable, but it quietly kills the project from the start. A sponsor does not just attend kick-off meetings. The sponsor sends a signal to the project team: ‘the top of the company is behind this.’ Without that signal, the team feels exposed when a resistant department manager pushes back. In a business environment where budgets are still recovering from the 2001 economic crisis, projects without a clear internal champion are also the first to lose funding when priorities shift.
There is also the question of data definitions. In a company where finance and sales have never agreed on what counts as ‘a completed sale’ or ‘available stock,’ building a shared data warehouse forces that conversation into the open. This is uncomfortable, and departments will resist. The sponsor’s job is not to be a technical expert. The sponsor’s job is to say: ‘we are going to agree on one definition, and here is what it is.’ That kind of authority cannot be delegated to a project manager or a software vendor.
Before committing to a BI or data warehouse project, ask yourself one question: is there a senior manager in this company who will own the data disputes, say no to resistant departments when necessary, and stay visibly involved until the project delivers results? If the answer is yes, move forward. If the answer is no or not sure, find that person first. The software selection, the technical architecture, the consultant — all of that can wait. A well-chosen system with no sponsor will not survive its first internal conflict. That is not a technical problem any program can fix.
This article was originally written in Turkish by Gökhan MERCANOĞLU on June 2, 2003 and has been automatically translated into English and other languages using machine translation.