Balancing your BI Strategy

For those of you that lead Business Intelligence teams or programs, you likely have encountered a big dilemma...  How can we move forward with a Business Intelligence strategy when there is such a big demand for information today?  In most organizations the demand for information far outstrips the resources available.  Information providers in an organization are consumed with resolving repeatable data quality issues, delivering endless cuts of information, and then delivering it again next month.

If we added up all the resources and time taken to keep pace with this flow, we would quickly see a lot of money being spent without delivering a lot of sustainable value.  I've seen this struggle manifest itself a number of times, and have found that it is possible to do both.  Not easy to balance, but possible.  There are 3 areas of focus that enable this:

• Sell Business Value
• Separate Resources
• Deliver Incrementally

Sell Business Value

Due to the nature of Business Intelligence solutions, it is important to communicate the value of investing in long-term, sustainable solutions.  These business benefits can include a quicker turnaround on requests, more self service information, and higher data quality.  Find the benefits that fit your organization, and communicate to your key stakeholders.  You need to show what value you can deliver to their organization, and to the bottom line.

Separate Resources

As you communicate the value of strategic BI solutions to your stakeholders, also identify the need to dedicate resources to building these solutions.  Align on the number of resources that will be dedicated to building strategic solutions vs. resources dedicated to tactical response.  It is important to identify the impact of these decisions to the operational capacity that will now be available.

As you focus resources on building strategic solutions, ensure that communication tools and knowledge sharing exist between both sides of the organization, strategic and tactical.  Resources supporting tactical requirements have comprehensive knowledge of information requirements and can be a big asset in driving user adoption of the new solutions.

Deliver Incrementally

To quickly prove the value of this approach, you must deliver incremental solutions that deliver direct value to the organization.  Delivering using an agile approach will allow you to maintain your momentum and build a community around using BI tools.  Having architecture talent and good design processes will ensure that the incremental solutions build into a larger, enterprise view.

As part of your BI program or competency centre, communication and engagement with your user community is vital to deliver solutions that provide the maximum amount of value.  Finding a balance between operational support and strategic delivery will help you achieve the goals of your BI program.

Operational Reporting Meets Business Intelligence

One of the interesting debates we have had over the past couple years is the difference between true Business Intelligence and Operational Reporting. This discussion started around who within the IT organization was accountable for developing "reporting" for applications. We have come from a place where Business Intelligence and reporting were considered synonymous, and all reporting requirements were considered the domain of the organization's Business Intelligence team. The argument was that reports that are more operationally based needed to fit into the overall information architecture, along with more analytical style of reporting. The issue became that no single team was able to have the subject area knowledge of every operational system within the organization.

Ok, phase II, all operational reporting requirements would be handled by the development teams most familiar with the application. This makes a lot of sense since a report can be considered simply an output of the application (definition of an app: inputs into a process, a process that happens, and then outputs come out). The major issue here is that this can lead to silos of reporting being developed that are not integrated into the enterprise information framework. As an end user, do you really want to have to go to multiple applications / portals to get all the reports you need?? This doesn't make any sense, as a consumer I want the "one stop" shopping approach.

The future... I really see that we have an opportunity to provide one integrated portal to knowledge workers that contains all the information they need to do what knowledge workers do best. It shouldn't matter what application / database the data is contained in, it should all fit into one portal, one integrated set of data assets. All the major BI platforms are now able to support basic reporting, slice & dice, predictive models and dashboards. We truly can make a one size fits all platform, even if we end up with a couple technologies being stiched together. As long as they can integrate (meta data, meta data, meta data) we can still call it a single platform.

Ok so the technology is there, but how do we make this all work? That is the million dollar question, by definition we would need to account for the following:

• Multiple development groups (IT & Business) contributing to this single platform
• Decisions on how to present data for reporting (source system, operational data stores, data warehouses) - Architecture decisions to ensure appropriate reporting architecture are key
• Providing a set of best practices and standards across all teams
• Potential conflicts between groups on business definitions and rules

The concept of the Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC) can be the glue that holds this distributed approach together. The BICC can set the standards, build the processes and provide that central view of the overall information architecture that is so key to leverage a single integrated environment.

Here is a link describing the BICC concept, there is a ton of information out there, most of the major BI vendors provide information as well.

http://www.olapreport.com/bicc.htm

No one said it would be easy...8)

Mark