A Different Approach To Business Intelligence
Everyone knows the problem
- Information hidden within a mass of transactional data
- Inconsistent information causes unhappiness
- Labour-intensive environment creates a large backlog of requirements
- Users look elsewhere for answers
- Credibility hole
Everyone knows how to fix it
- Provide a single, consistent source of the truth
- Do it quickly
- Hit the mark
Few do – why?
- Too much noise
- Hard to hear the real question
- Hard to formulate a punchy answer – it all sounds trivial
- Planning gets disrupted constantly
- System extracts are complex and data is poor
- Bottom up approach
Overall Approach – Saving it
- Find a friendly senior manager to work with
- Understand his real problems and what information goes with them
- Find out what you have and agree on what is possible
- Do it with a dedicated resource
- Model his piece of the data
- Deliver in small chunks
- Find the next one
In parallel
- Assess BI maturity
- Map out Key Performance Areas
- Draft Conceptual Model
- Identify burning needs/quick wins
- Group and prioritise
- Estimate effort and time
- Estimate benefit
- Buy-in and budget
Maturity Assessment
BI Maturity Model:
Simple Information Model:
Objective:
Deliver one version of the truth to business
- Actions.
- Data quality must be addressed at source.
- ETL level data cleansing creates more problems than it solves.
- Business rules for derivation must be formally defined.
- Data management must be a formal discipline.
- Conflicting or multiple sourcing must be resolved and agreed to by business prior to
- commencement of ETL development.
- A single ETL will exist for any atomic-level data item.
- Any interpretation of the business rule will be contained in the ETL.
- No changes to atomic-level data in the repository will be allowed by any other agency.
- Embed a simple version of this “one version” as a key component of upper-level KPI reporting.
- The cascade effect is indispensable for adoption by the organisation.
Objective:
Make information accessible, thereby liberating business from limited availability of technologists
- Actions
- Provide a well-structured information repository
- Publish all business rule definitions
- Publish all ETL timings (eg pre- and post- monthend, weekly, etc) with appropriate warnings.
- Provide a front-end tool with a friendly user interface, and ability to navigate cube structures.
- Provide metadata information in an unambiguous and “instinctive” way
- Provide context-based, example-based training on demand to users
- Manage change to source systems formally so that BI definitions are not invalidated
- Initiate early adoption in a trial business area for the “information steward” role.
Objective:
Support a broad spectrum of business decisions, with an increasing impact on good decision-making and process efficiency
- Actions
- Collect all data items from particular tables when these are first visited to develop new ETLs.
- Build an understanding of the evolution of business KPI’s by close alignment with business
- business decision-makers
- Provide for inclusion of externally-sourced data in the repository
- Risks must be explicitly recognised and managed
- Business Activity Monitoring to provide process execution statistics to BI.
If you can do all this on your own, you’re superman!
