Making Your Information Pay

BI is not a Silver Bullet to fix the woes of the organization, it is not a panacea. Problems more deeply rooted need to be solved before the success of BI can be reaped.

- Rob O’Neill, principal analyst for Australasia, Fairfax Business

Implementing a BI strategy is a complex task. Besides the technologies that are to be integrated, business, people and cultural (organization-specific operational practices) issues cannot be overlooked.

Traditionally, BI started as a basic reporting tool which was applications specific or line-ofbusiness specific. Today, it also includes powerful analytical capabilities, which are used increasingly for informed decision making and even for “What IF analysis” purposes.Currently, BI promises to find answers to common business questions from raw data stored in multiple systems.

The effectiveness of information derived from a BI strategy is heavily dependent on how the strategy is implemented. Here, heads of IT and analysts should work hands in gloves in order to put in place an operationally sustainable BI strategy. This document addresses the essential steps that will help you while jotting a BI strategy for your organization.

Align BI with Your Business Goals:

As rightly put in by Michael Barnes, senior program director for application delivery strategies at Meta Group, "A BI strategy implementation has to be driven by business requirements. Enterprises have to avoid creating a BI architecture without first defining business objectives." Defining the objective helps understand the very essence of why BI should exist in the organization which, in turn, helps in understanding the way various groups/ departments are going make use of the information & collaborate.

Assess IT Infrastructure:

When it comes to the IS management, one should start assessing the most relevant IT assets that are contributing to generating the information to be managed which will be impacting the process of informed decision making. For example, when it comes to BI for IT infrastructure management & relevant services, one should start recording the IT assets including Servers, Networking components, Telecom components, Storage devices, Business Applications etc. that are sourcing the information required to be managed. It is important to ascertain how you are going to identify the given asset among the rest of your IT organizational set up. This piece of information is critical for all your future data warehousing and information analysis requirements. If you don’t have this as a part of the process, even technology will not be able to help you out!

First Thing First- Make sure to get the process Right:

Information management is more important for any business when compared to information technology. Implementation of BI technology without appropriate BI strategy will lead to a worst situation. Remember that in most of the cases, the existing processes are either re-engineered or automated by the BI tool as a part of their ETL – Extract, Transform and Load- methodology. Ideally, you should prepare a comprehensive record of all relevant processes which can be referred to as a cook book by the BI architect.

Ensure that ‘Data’ is error free:

Most of the organizations have small data marts in various ‘pockets’ of their IT infrastructure. As every department has their own reporting needs and applications, by legacy, they will maintain their data marts accordingly. How the data is presented is also department specific and is typically taken care by the respective application/tools.

Evaluate Tools:

Before finalizing on BI tool, it is paramount that you understand the underneath architectural design of the tool. Meaning, the way it extracts the data from various sources across your IT Infrastructure, converts it into necessary data structure/ formats and loads into the common repository. Pay attention to the operating system(s) & other technology resources it requires (as a pre-requisite), while performing those tasks. Also, keep in mind that even if the BI is deployed across enterprise, every function & the people executing different roles will have unique requirements when it comes to the way the analyzed data is presented to them. So dashboards have to be flexible enough & customizable on need basis. At the end, make sure that the BI tool should not “lock” you to a particular technology stack (proprietary technologies) that will eventually become a major show stopper for all relevant future developments around BI needs. This holds true, especially when it comes to the “completeness” aspect of the BI tool/ application that also addresses requirement of integrating it with your existing business applications.Try looking beyond technology while you evaluate BI tools. Understand the capabilities of the tool in terms of its ability to addressing varying process requirements & cost implications of the same.

Scrutinize Security:

Before you finalize on the BI tool/ application, understand the security requirements holistically. That is from the regulatory compliance perspective, from process compliance perspective and from operational compliance perspective. Keep in mind that “logs” provided by the BI tool/applications may not suffice your BI strategy. The BI strategy should clearly identify & spell out those compliance requirements. It is also important to verify the security related options the tool is providing. For example, certain set of analyzed data is available to only relevant identified group of people or to an individual depending upon the role & responsibility. Ideally, the tool shouldn’t allow the administrator of the tool to access the analyzed information or relevant dashboards. This is very important. Administrator of the tool is not driving your business. In a nut shell, ascertain that the tool will not permit any unauthorized access to the information in order to ensure proper information access control across enterprise.

Involve key people from businesses:

The core of BI is the techniques used to ‘extracting’ the insights of your data (either structured or unstructured; qualitative or quantitative) . Business Intelligence without Business Logic is like having a knife without an edge! If BI has to empower informed decision making, make sure you involve key people from business in order to understand the KPIs – Key Performance Indices- of your business so as to make sure that those are tracked well by the BI tool. So, the BI strategy should record those KPIs (primary & secondary) keeping the ‘pressure points of businesses’ in mind.

Get the practices right:

This is a cultural aspect & a major one to decide your success. Most of the cases, BI strategy implementation has to face “firewalls of egos” within the organization & at the end, the whole purpose of having BI fails. So simply by making your BI strategy right may not help. It is important for the organizations to build the right kind of process culture within the organization that acts as catalyst. Identify key people from within the relevant functional areas & make sure of keeping them on the same page while you start validating the BI strategy.

Running a PoC projects:

At times, it is easy to prepare a BI strategy, as it takes couple of days in meeting room & brainstorming with the people concern. But in order to validate the outcome of the strategy, you need right people for planning the time, architecting the solution and implementing it in a right way. So is with your financial investments. Running a PoC - Proof of Concept – or simply a pilot helps a ton. Make sure you run such pilots to get a better visibility of the deliverables of the BI tool/ application, you are going to implement. This way, every stake holder gets a clear idea in terms of what exactly he/ she is going to get out of this strategy and how that information is going to change the way they make decisions. Pay attention to the kind of flexibility your BI tool offers while addressing changes in the business requirements.

Rolling out:

Once you address all above steps, the time is to actually “roll out” your BI strategy. Ensure that the changes in your business requirements can be accommodated well in time.

In a nut shell, due to ever increasing complexities in today’s business models, not all business requirements can be well addressed by technology alone. Process practices must go hand-in-gloves with technology in order to leverage on your BI strategy. Remember that it is not just the BI tool itself, but the way you are going to deploy it & leverage on it, will help you in creating the competitive edge.