Business Intelligence (BI) is a key enabler for organizations
to be responsive to their environments and turn masses of data
into actionable insight. In order to reach the ultimate goal of
monitoring all vital signs of their organization and
understanding where they are heading there are many components
that have to be in place. We have found that there are four key
areas that an organization must assess to determine the correct
focus for their BI initiatives.
Understand
To provide maximum value to an organization, BI initiatives
must be undertaken with a strong knowledge of the business’s
goals and the user environment. Users and their sponsors need to
buy in to BI initiatives. Your organization must have a
commitment to fact based decision making and an environment of
trust between departments. An overall understanding of the
Critical Success Factors for the business is also vitally
important. Senior Executives need to show support for BI by
championing a global BI strategy and roadmap and providing
training to all information workers. Senior Executives can best
demonstrate their commitment by insisting that all business
plans and proposals are backed up by information from corporate
BI systems.
Collect
Data Capture and Quality - The very
beginning of the data life cycle is capturing the data that will
eventually be analyzed and studied. Some data, such as sales
orders, is typically already captured in transactional systems.
More qualitative information, such as customer satisfaction, is
often captured in a more manual, less rigorous fashion such as
in Word templates or emails. External information from suppliers
and industry or demographic data is playing an increasingly
important role in BI. Businesses need to ensure they have access
to all necessary data in order to be successful in BI
initiatives.
Once the data is captured, in order for business users to
make informed, confident decisions the data needs to have high
integrity. This is becoming increasingly important as some
industries are becoming more regulated and data is being
provided as part of regulatory compliance. Data quality needs to
be considered at many aspects of the data life cycle. This
includes an enterprise wide data dictionary and an ongoing
strategy for data profiling, cleansing and auditing.
Data Integration and Storage - The back bone
of a BI system are the datamarts and data warehouse that brings
together information from various source systems. Once they are
in place there are many applications that can be built on top of
them. Analysis of the source system data and understanding the
relationships between the source system data is key to making a
successful datamart.
Analyze
Data Analysis - Power business users often
need to be able to analyze data in a more flexible, dynamic
environment beyond reports. Data analysis tools permit them to
begin with an understandable data model and slice-and-dice it
enabling them to find the answers to the questions they are
pursuing.
Data Mining - Data Mining provides an
additional level of sophistication of working with the data. It
enables business users to perform operations such as what-if
scenarios and forecast into the future. Data mining is typically
performed by dedicated business analysts who are trained in
statistical methods, but newer tools are being introduced that
bring this analytical power to every knowledge worker.
Deliver
Reporting - Reports are the baseline of
applications used to support business intelligence. Reports
often grow in an organic fashion within each business unit
leading to inconsistent construction and duplicated effort. By
having a centralized, standard reporting process, usability and
quality of the reports increase. As well, the amount of effort
required to deploy the reports decreases.
Performance Management - BI is the
foundation on which Performance Management is built. BI provides
the information with which an organization can be measured and
compared against its critical success factors. This is the stage
at which Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) are tracked and
displayed and performance management methodologies such as
Balanced Scorecards are utilized.
Dashboard - A BI dashboard brings together
all the BI components into one place and combines it with
additional business context. It becomes the centralized
workspace for the business user. Dashboards are usually deployed
within a portal environment so that they are readily available
to all knowledge workers.
In each of our BI engagements, we work with our customers to
go through a comprehensive questionnaire to assess each of these
areas. Although the list seems long and daunting, the good news
is that most organizations already have many of the necessary
pieces in place. Also, the introduction of more user friendly
tools, many of which are integrated into software that
organizations already own, means that putting the missing pieces
in place can be achieved more easily than ever before.
Craig McQueen is Director of Business Intelligence Solutions.
He can be reached at:
or 416-304-1338 x19.
