Besides the small introduction, subscribers and consulting clients within this management domain have access to:
Lay the foundation for the BI strategy by detailing key business information and analyzing current BI usage.
Assess the maturity level of the current BI practice and envision a future state.
Create BI-focused initiatives to build an improvement roadmap.
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Document overall business vision, mission, and key objectives; assemble project team.
Collect in-depth information around current BI usage and BI user perception.
Create requirements gathering principles and gather requirements for a BI platform.
Increased IT–business alignment by using the business context as the project starting point
Identified project sponsor and project team
Detailed understanding of trends in BI usage and BI perception of consumers
Refreshed requirements for a BI solution
1.1 Gather key business information (overall mission, goals, objectives, drivers).
1.2 Establish a high-level ROI.
1.3 Identify ideal candidates for carrying out a BI project.
1.4 Undertake BI usage analyses, BI user perception survey, and a BI artifact inventory.
1.5 Develop requirements gathering principles and approaches.
1.6 Gather and organize BI requirements
Articulated business context that will guide BI strategy development
ROI for refreshing the BI strategy
BI project team
Comprehensive summary of current BI usage that has quantitative and qualitative perspectives
BI requirements are confirmed
Define current maturity level of BI practice.
Envision the future state of your BI practice and identify desired BI patterns.
Know the correct migration method for Exchange Online.
Prepare user profiles for the rest of the Office 365 implementation.
2.1 Perform BI SWOT analyses.
2.2 Assess current state of the BI practice and review results.
2.3 Create guiding principles for the future BI practice.
2.4 Identify desired BI patterns and the associated BI functionalities/requirements.
2.5 Define the future state of the BI practice.
2.6 Establish the critical success factors for the future BI, identify potential risks, and create a mitigation plan.
Exchange migration strategy
Current state of BI practice is documented from multiple perspectives
Guiding principles for future BI practice are established, along with the desired BI patterns linked to functional requirements
Future BI practice is defined
Critical success factors, potential risks, and a risk mitigation plan are defined
Build overall BI improvement initiatives and create a BI improvement roadmap.
Identify supplementary initiatives for enhancing your BI program.
Defined roadmap composed of robust improvement initiatives
3.1 Create BI improvement initiatives based on outputs from phase 1 and 2 activities. Build an improvement roadmap.
3.2 Build an improvement roadmap.
3.3 Create an Excel governance policy.
3.4 Create a plan for a BI ambassador network.
Comprehensive BI initiatives placed on an improvement roadmap
Excel governance policy is created
Internal BI ambassadors are identified
As the reporting and analytics space matured over the last decade, software suppliers used different terminology to differentiate their products from others’. This caused a great deal of confusion within the business communities.
Following are two definitions of the term Business Intelligence:
Business intelligence (BI) leverages software and services to transform data into actionable insights that inform an organization’s strategic and tactical business decisions. BI tools access and analyze data sets and present analytical findings in reports, summaries, dashboards, graphs, charts, and maps to provide users with detailed intelligence about the state of the business.
The term business intelligence often also refers to a range of tools that provide quick, easy-to-digest access to insights about an organization's current state, based on available data.
Business intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information. BI technologies provide historical, current, and predictive views of business operations.
Common functions of business intelligence technologies include reporting, online analytical processing, analytics, data mining, process mining, complex event processing, business performance management, benchmarking, text mining, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics.
We need data to inform the business of past and current performance and to support strategic decisions. But we can also drown in a flood of data. Without a clear strategy for business intelligence, a promising new solution will produce only noise.
BI and Analytics teams must provide the right quantitative and qualitative insights for the business to base their decisions on.
Your Business Intelligence and Analytics strategy must support the organization’s strategy. Your strategy for BI & Analytics provides direction and requirements for data warehousing and data integration, and further paves the way for predictive analytics, big data analytics, market/industry intelligence, and social network analytics.
Dirk Coetsee,
Director, Data and Analytics Info-Tech Research Group
BI drives a new reality. Uber is the world’s largest taxi company and they own no vehicles; Alibaba is the world’s most valuable retailer and they have no inventory; Airbnb is the world’s largest accommodation provider and they own no real estate. How did they disrupt their markets and get past business entry barriers? A deep understanding of their market through impeccable business intelligence!
Info-Tech Insight
Practice Improvement Metrics | Data Collection and Calculation | Expected Improvement | |
Program Level Metrics | Efficiency
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Comprehensiveness
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Tap into the results of Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision diagnostic to monitor the changes in business-user satisfaction as you implement the initiatives in your BI improvement roadmap.
Formulating an Enterprise Reporting and Analytics Strategy requires the business vision and strategies to first be substantiated. Any optimization to the Data Warehouse, Integration and Source layer is in turn driven by the Enterprise Reporting and Analytics Strategy
The current state of your Integration and Warehouse platforms determine what data can be utilized for BI and Analytics
Industry: Manufacturing and Retail
Source: RICOH
Ricoh Canada transforms the way people work with breakthrough technologies that help businesses innovate and grow. Its focus has always been to envision what the future will look like so that it can help its customers prepare for success. Ricoh empowers digital workplaces with a broad portfolio of services, solutions, and technologies – helping customers remove obstacles to sustained growth by optimizing the flow of information and automating antiquated processes to increase workplace productivity. In their commitment towards a customer-centric approach, Ricoh Canada recognized that BI and analytics can be used to inform business leaders in making strategic decisions.
Enterprise BI and analytics Initiative
Ricoh Canada enrolled in the ITRG Reporting & Analytics strategy workshop with the aim to create a BI strategy that will allow the business to harvest it strengths and build for the future. The workshop acted as a forum for the different business units to communicate, share ideas, and hear from each other what their pains are and what should be done to provide a full customer 360 view.
Results
“This workshop allowed us to collectively identify the various stakeholders and their unique requirements. This is a key factor in the development of an effective BI Analytics tool.” David Farrar
The Customer 360 Initiative included the following components
In today’s ever-changing and global environment, organizations of every size need to effectively leverage their data assets to facilitate three key business drivers: customer intimacy, product/service innovation, and operational excellence. Plus, they need to manage their operational risk efficiently.
Investing in a comprehensive business intelligence strategy allows for a multidimensional view of your organization’s data assets that can be operationalized to create a competitive edge:
Without a BI strategy, creating meaningful reports for business users that highlight trends in past performance and draw relationships between different data sources becomes a more complex task. Also, the ever growing need to identify and assess risks in new ways is driving many companies to BI.
The core purpose of BI is to provide the right data, to the right users, at the right time, and in a format that is easily consumable and actionable. In developing a BI strategy, remember the driver for managed cross-functional access to data assets and features such as interactive dashboards, mobile BI, and self-service BI.
As the volume, variety, and velocity of data increases rapidly, businesses will need a strategy to outline how they plan to consume the new data in a manner that does not overwhelm their current capabilities and aligns with their desired future state. This same strategy further provides a foundation upon which organizations can transition from ad hoc reporting to using data assets in a codified BI platform for decision support.
As executive decision making shifts to more fact-based, data-driven thinking, there is an urgent need for data assets to be organized and presented in a manner that enables immediate action.
Typically, business decisions are based on a mix of intuition, opinion, emotion, organizational culture, and data. Though business users may be aware of its potential value in driving operational change, data is often viewed as inaccessible.
Business intelligence bridges the gap between an organization’s data assets and consumable information that facilitates insight generation and informed decision making.
Most organizations realize that they need a BI strategy; it’s no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.
– Albert Hui, Principal, Data Economist
Ask 100 people and you will get 100 answers. We like the prevailing view that BI looks at today and backward for improving who we are, while BA is forward-looking to support change decisions.
However, establishing a strong business intelligence program is a necessary precursor to an organization’s development of its business analytics capabilities.
Evidence is piling up: if planned well, BI contributes to the organization’s bottom line.
It’s expected that there will be nearly 45 billion connected devices and a 42% increase in data volume each year posing a high business opportunity for the BI market (BERoE, 2020).
The global business intelligence market size to grow from US$23.1 billion in 2020 to US$33.3 billion by 2025, at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.6% (Global News Wire, 2020)
In the coming years, 69% of companies plan on increasing their cloud business intelligence usage (BARC Research and Eckerson Group Study, 2017).
Small organizations of up to 100 employees had the highest rate of business intelligence penetration last year (Forbes, 2018).
Source: IBM Business Value, 2015
Industry: Professional Sports
Source Target Marketing
Despite continued success as a franchise with a loyal fan base, the New England Patriots experienced one of their lowest season ticket renewal rates in over a decade for the 2009 season. Given the numerous email addresses that potential and current season-ticket holders used to engage with the organization, it was difficult for Kraft Sports Group to define how to effectively reach customers.
Kraft Sports Group turned to the customer data that it had been collecting since 2007 and chose to leverage analytics in order to glean insight into season ticket holder behavior. By monitoring and reporting on customer activity online and in attendance at games, Kraft Sports Group was able to establish that customer engagement improved when communication from the organization was specifically tailored to customer preferences and historical behavior.
By operationalizing their data assets with the help of analytics, the Patriots were able to achieve a record 97% renewal rate for the 2010 season. KSG was able to take their customer engagement to the next level and proactively look for signs of attrition in season-ticket renewals.
We're very analytically focused and I consider us to be the voice of the customer within the organization… Ultimately, we should know when renewal might not happen and be able to market and communicate to change that behavior.
– Jessica Gelman,
VP Customer Marketing and Strategy, Kraft Sports Group
BI pitfalls are lurking around every corner, but a comprehensive strategy drafted upfront can help your organization overcome these obstacles. Info-Tech’s approach to BI has involvement from the business units built right into the process from the start and it equips IT to interact with key stakeholders early and often.
Only 62% of Big Data and AI projects in 2019 provided measurable results.
Source: NewVantage Partners LLC
Info-Tech Insight
Combining these priorities will lead to better tool selection and more synergy.
Industry Drivers | Private label | Rising input prices | Retail consolidation |
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Company strategies | Win at supply chain execution | Win at customer service | Expand gross margins |
Value disciplines | Strategic cost management | Operational excellence | Customer service |
Core processes | Purchasing | Inbound logistics | Sales, service & distribution |
Enterprise management: Planning, budgeting, control, process improvement, HR | |||
BI Opportunities | Customer service analysis | Cost and financial analysis | Demand management |
Williams (2016)
Info-Tech’s approach to formulating a fit-for-purpose BI strategy is focused on making the link between factors that are the most important to the business users and the ways that BI providers can enable those consumers.
Though business intelligence is primarily thought of as enabling executives, a comprehensive BI strategy involves a spectrum of analytics that can provide data-driven insight to all levels of an organization.
Styles of BI | New age BI | New age data | Functional Analytics | Tools |
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Reporting | Agile BI | Social Media data | Performance management analytics | Scorecarding dashboarding |
Ad hoc query | SaaS BI | Unstructured data | Financial analytics | Query & reporting |
Parameterized queries | Pervasive BI | Mobile data | Supply chain analytics | Statistics & data mining |
OLAP | Cognitive Business | Big data | Customer analytics | OLAP cubes |
Advanced analytics | Self service analytics | Sensor data | Operations analytics | ETL |
Cognitive business techniques | Real-time Analytics | Machine data | HR Analytics | Master data management |
Scorecards & dashboards | Mobile Reporting & Analytics | “fill in the blanks” analytics | Data Governance |
Williams (2016)
"BI can be confusing and overwhelming…"
– Dirk Coetsee,
Research Director,
Info-Tech Research Group
The interactions between the information dimensions and overlying data management enablers such as data governance, data architecture, and data quality underscore the importance of building a robust process surrounding the other data practices in order to fully leverage your BI platform.
Within this framework BI and analytics are grouped as one lens through which data assets at the business information level can be viewed.
A BI program is not a static project that is created once and remains unchanged. Your strategy must be treated as a living platform to be revisited and revitalized in order to effectively enable business decision making. Develop a reporting and analytics strategy that propels your organization by building it on business goals and objectives, as well as comprehensive assessments that quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate your current reporting and analytical capabilities.
Phase 1: Understand the Business Context and BI Landscape | Phase 2: Evaluate Your Current BI Practice | Phase 3: Create a BI Roadmap for Continuous Improvement |
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1.1 Establish the Business Context
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2.1 Assess Your Current BI Maturity
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3.1 Construct a BI Initiative Roadmap
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1.2 Assess Existing BI Environment
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2.2 Envision BI Future State
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3.2 Plan for Continuous Improvement
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1.3 Develop BI Solution Requirements
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As part of our research process, we leveraged the frameworks of COBIT5, Mike 2.0, and DAMA DMBOK2. Contextualizing business intelligence within these frameworks clarifies its importance and role and ensures that our assessment tool is focused on key priority areas.
The DMBOK2 Data Management framework by the Data Asset Management Association (DAMA) provided a starting point for our classification of the components in our IM framework.
Mike 2.0 is a data management framework that helped guide the development of our framework through its core solutions and composite solutions.
The Cobit 5 framework and its business enablers were used as a starting point for assessing the performance capabilities of the different components of information management, including business intelligence.
BI Strategy Roadmap Template
BI Practice Assessment Tool
BI Initiatives and Roadmap Tool
BI Strategy and Roadmap Executive Presentation Template
DIY Toolkit | Guided Implementation | Workshop | Consulting |
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“Our team has already made this critical project a priority, and we have the time and capability, but some guidance along the way would be helpful.” | “Our team knows that we need to fix a process, but we need assistance to determine where to focus. Some check-ins along the way would help keep us on track.” | “We need to hit the ground running and get this project kicked off immediately. Our team has the ability to take this over once we get a framework and strategy in place.” | “Our team does not have the time or the knowledge to take this project on. We need assistance through the entirety of this project.” |
Diagnostics and consistent frameworks used throughout all four options
1. Understand the Business Context and BI Landscape | 2. Evaluate the Current BI Practice | 3. Create a BI Roadmap for Continuous Improvement | |
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Best-Practice Toolkit | 1.1 Document overall business vision, mission, industry drivers, and key objectives; assemble a project team 1.2 Collect in-depth information around current BI usage and BI user perception 1.3 Create requirements gathering principles and gather requirements for a BI platform |
2.1 Define current maturity level of BI practice 2.2 Envision the future state of your BI practice and identify desired BI patterns |
3.1 Build overall BI improvement initiatives and create a BI improvement roadmap 3.2 Identify supplementary initiatives for enhancing your BI program |
Guided Implementations |
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Onsite Workshop | Module 1: Establish Business Vision and Understand the Current BI Landscape |
Module 2: Evaluate Current BI Maturity Identify the BI Patterns for the Future State |
Module 3: Build Improvement Initiatives and Create a BI Development Roadmap |
Phase 1 Outcome:
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Phase 2 Outcome:
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Phase 3 Outcome:
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Contact your account representative or email Workshops@InfoTech.com for more information.
Workshop Day 1 | Workshop Day 2 | Workshop Day 3 | Workshop Day 4 | |
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Activities | Understand Business Context and Structure the Project 1.1 Make the case for a BI strategy refresh. 1.2 Understand business context. 1.3 Determine high-level ROI. 1.4 Structure the BI strategy refresh project. |
Understand Existing BI and Revisit Requirements 2.1 Understand the usage of your existing BI. 2.2 Gather perception of the current BI users. 2.3 Document existing information artifacts. 2.4 Develop a requirements gathering framework. 2.5 Gather requirements. |
Revisit Requirements and Current Practice Assessment 3.1 Gather requirements. 3.2 Determine BI Maturity Level. 3.3 Perform a SWOT for your existing BI program. 3.4 Develop a current state summary. |
Roadmap Develop and Plan for Continuous Improvements 5.1 Develop BI strategy. 5.2 Develop a roadmap for the strategy. 5.3 Plan for continuous improvement opportunities. 5.4 Develop a re-strategy plan. |
Deliverables |
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Step 1: Establish the business context in terms of business vision, mission, objectives, industry drivers, and business processes that can leverage Business Intelligence
Step 2: Understand your BI Landscape
Step 3: Understand business needs
The closer you align your new BI platform to real business interests, the stronger the buy-in, realized value, and groundswell of enthusiastic adoption will be. Get this phase right to realize a high ROI on your investment in the people, processes, and technology that will be your next generation BI platform.
Understand the Business Context to Rationalize Your BI Landscape | Evaluate Your Current BI Practice | Create a BI Roadmap for Continuous Improvement |
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Establish the Business Context
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Assess Your Current BI Maturity
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Construct a BI Initiative Roadmap
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Access Existing BI Environment
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Envision BI Future State
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Plan for Continuous Improvement
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Undergo Requirements Gathering
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Practice Improvement Metrics | Data Collection and Calculation | Expected Improvement |
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Monetary ROI
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Derive the number of the use cases, benefits, and costs in the scoping. Ask business SMEs to verify the quality. | High-quality ROI studies are created for at least three use cases |
Response Rate of the BI Perception Survey | Sourced from your survey delivery system | Aim for 40% response rate |
# of BI Reworks | Sourced from your project management system | Reduction of 10% in BI reworks |
Intangible Metrics:
Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.
Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of two to three advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.
Proposed Time to Completion: 2-4 weeks
Start with an analyst kick-off call:
Then complete these activities…
Start with an analyst kick-off call:
Then complete these activities…
Review findings with analyst:
Then complete these activities…
With these tools & templates:
Info-Tech recommends you select a senior executive with close ties to BI be the sponsor for this project (e.g. CDO, CFO or CMO). To maximize the chance of success, Info-Tech recommends you start with the CDO, CMO, CFO, or a business unit (BU) leader who represents strategic enterprise portfolios.
CFO or Chief Risk Officer (CRO)
CDO or a Business Unit (BU) Leader
CEO
"In the energy sector, achieving production KPIs are the key to financial success. The CFO is motivated to work with IT to create BI applications that drive higher revenue, identify operational bottlenecks, and maintain gross margin."
– Yogi Schulz, Partner, Corvelle Consulting
Create a project team with the right skills, experience, and perspectives to develop a comprehensive strategy aligned to business needs.
You may need to involve external experts as well as individuals within the organization who have the needed skills.
A detailed understanding of what to look for in potential candidates is essential before moving forward with your BI project.
Leverage several of Info-Tech’s Job Description Templates to aid in the process of selecting the right people to involve in constructing your BI strategy.
Business Stakeholders
Business Intelligence Specialist
"In developing the ideal BI team, your key person to have is a strong data architect, but you also need buy-in from the highest levels of the organization. Buy-in from different levels of the organization are indicators of success more than anything else."
– Rob Anderson, Database Administrator and BI Manager, IT Research and Advisory Firm
A common project management pitfall for any endeavour is unclear definition of responsibilities amongst the individuals involved.
As a business intelligence project requires a significant amount of back and forth between business and IT – bridged by the BI Steering Committee – clear guidelines at the project outset with a RACI chart provide a basic framework for assigning tasks and lines of communication for the later stages.
Obtaining Buy-in | Project Charter | Requirements | Design | Development | Program Creation | |
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BI Steering Committee | A | C | I | I | I | C |
Project Sponsor | - | C | I | I | I | C |
Project Manager | - | R | A | I | I | C |
VP of BI | R | I | I | I | I | A |
CIO | A | I | I | I | I | R |
Business Analyst | I | I | R | C | C | C |
Solution Architect | - | - | C | A | C | C |
Data Architect | - | - | C | A | C | C |
BI Developer | - | - | C | C | R | C |
Data Steward | - | - | C | R | C | C |
Business SME | C | C | C | C | C | C |
Note: This RACI is an example of how role expectations would be broken down across the different steps of the project. Develop your own RACI based on project scope and participants.
1.1.1 Craft the vision and mission statements for the Analytics program using the vision, mission, and strategies of your organization as basis.
1.1.2 Articulate program goals and objectives
1.1.3 Determine business differentiators and key drivers
1.1.4 Brainstorm BI-specific constraints and improvement objectives
Your BI strategy should enable the business to make fast, effective, and comprehensive decisions.
Fast | Effective | Comprehensive |
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Reduce time spent on decision-making by designing a BI strategy around information needs of key decision makers. | Make the right data available to key decision makers. | Make strategic high-value, impactful decisions as well as operational decisions. |
"We can improve BI environments in several ways. First, we can improve the speed with which we create BI objects by insisting that the environments are designed with flexibility and adaptability in mind. Second, we can produce higher quality deliverables by ensuring that IT collaborate with the business on every deliverable. Finally, we can reduce the costs of BI by giving access to the environment to knowledgeable business users and encouraging a self-service function."
– Claudia Imhoff, Founder, Boulder BI Brain Trust, Intelligent Solutions Inc.
Different users have different consumption and usage patterns. Categorize users into user groups and visualize the usage patterns. The user groups are the connection between the BI capabilities and the users.
User groups | Mindset | Usage Pattern | Requirements |
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Front-line workers | Get my job done; perform my job quickly. | Reports (standard reports, prompted reports, etc.) | Examples:
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Analysts | I have some ideas; I need data to validate and support my ideas. | Dashboards, self-service BI, forecasting/budgeting, collaboration | Examples:
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Management | I need a big-picture view and yet I need to play around with the data to find trends to drive my business. | Dashboards, scorecards, mobile BI, forecasting/budgeting | Examples:
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Data scientists | I need to combine existing data, as well as external or new, unexplored data sources and types to find nuggets in the data. | Data mashup, connections to data sources | Examples:
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The overarching question that needs to be continually asked to create an effective BI strategy is:
How do I create an environment that makes information accessible and consumable to users, and facilitates a collaborative dialogue between the business and IT?
Sponsorship of BI that is outside of IT and at the highest levels of the organization is essential to the success of your BI strategy. Without it, there is a high chance that your BI program will fail. Note that it may not be an epic fail, but it is a subtle drying out in many cases.
Providing the right tools for business decision making doesn’t need to be a guessing game if the business context is laid as the project foundation and the most pressing decisions serve as starting points. And business is engaged in formulating and executing the strategy.
Start with understanding the business processes and where analytics can improve outcomes. “Think business backwards, not data forward.” (McKinsey)
Lack of Executive support
Old Technology
Lack of business support
Too many KPIs
No methodology for gathering requirements
Overly long project timeframes
Bad user experience
Lack of user adoption
Bad data
Lack of proper human resources
No upfront definition of true ROI
Mico Yuk, 2019
Make it clear to the business that IT is committed to building and supporting a BI platform that is intimately tied to enabling changing business objectives.
Document the BI program planning in Info-Tech’s
1.1.1
30-40 minutes
Compelling vision and mission statements will help guide your internal members toward your company’s target state. These will drive your business intelligence strategy.
Info-Tech Insight
Adjust your statements until you feel that you can elicit a firm understanding of both your vision and mission in three minutes or less.
Industry Drivers | Private label | Rising input prices | Retail consolidation |
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Company strategies | Win at supply chain execution | Win at customer service | Expand gross margins |
Value disciplines | Strategic cost management | Operational excellence | Customer service |
Core processes | Purchasing | Inbound logistics | Sales, service & distribution |
Enterprise management: Planning, budgeting, control, process improvement, HR | |||
BI Opportunities | Customer service analysis | Cost and financial analysis | Demand management |
Williams 2016
Arm your project sponsor with our Executive Brief for this blueprint as a quick way to convey the value of this project to potential stakeholders.
Bolster this presentation by adding use cases and metrics that are most relevant to your organization.
Identifying organizational goals and how data can support those goals is key to creating a successful BI & Analytical strategy. Rounding out the business model with technology drivers, environmental factors (as described in previous steps), and internal barriers and enablers creates a holistic view of Business Intelligence within the context of the organization as a whole.
Through business engagement and contribution, the following holistic model can be created to understand the needs of the business.
1.1.2
30-45 minutes
Industry drivers are external influencers that has an effect on a business such as economic conditions, competitor actions, trade relations, climate etc. These drivers can differ significantly by industry and even organizations within the same industry.
Environmental Factors | Organizational Goals | Business Needs | Technology Drivers | |
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Definition | External considerations are factors taking place outside the organization that are impacting the way business is conducted inside the organization. These are often outside the control of the business. | Organizational drivers can be thought of as business-level metrics. These are tangible benefits the business can measure, such as customer retention, operation excellence, and/or financial performance. | A requirement that specifies the behavior and the functions of a system. | Technology drivers are technological changes that have created the need for a new BI solution. Many organizations turn to technology systems to help them obtain a competitive edge. |
Examples |
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1.1.3
30-45 minutes
External Considerations | Organizational Drivers | Technology Considerations | Functional Requirements |
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There are several factors that may stifle the success of a BI implementation. Scan the current environment to identify internal barriers and challenges to identify potential challenges so you can meet them head-on.
Definition | The degree of management understanding and acceptance towards BI solutions. | The collective shared values and beliefs. | The functional relationships between people and departments in an organization. | The degree to which the organization’s people and processes are prepared for a new BI solution. |
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Questions |
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Impact |
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1.1.4
30-45 minutes
Functional Gaps | Technical Gaps | Process Gaps | Barriers to Success |
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1.1.5
30-45 minutes
Business Benefits | IT Benefits | Organizational Benefits | Enablers of Success |
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The following diagram represents [Client]’s business model for BI and data. This holistic view of [Client]’s current environment serves as the basis for the generation of the business-aligned Data & Analytics Strategy.
Taking a top-down approach will ensure senior management’s involvement and support throughout the project. This ensures that the most critical decisions are supported by the right data/information, aligning the entire organization with the BI strategy. Furthermore, the gains from BI will be much more significant and visible to the rest of the organization.
Far too often, organizations taking a bottom-up approach to BI will fail to generate sufficient buy-in and awareness from senior management. Not only does a lack of senior involvement result in lower adoption from the tactical and operational levels, but more importantly, it also means that the strategic decision makers aren’t taking advantage of BI.
The value of creating a new strategy – or revamping an existing one – needs to be conveyed effectively to a high-level stakeholder, ideally a C-level executive. That executive buy-in is more likely to be acquired when effort has been made to determine the return on investment for the overall initiative.
Business Impacts |
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New revenue |
Cost savings |
Time to market |
Internal Benefits |
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Productivity gain |
Process optimization |
Investment |
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People – employees’ time, external resources |
Data – cost for new datasets |
Technology – cost for new technologies |
Example
One percent increase in revenue; three more employees | $225,000/yr, $150,000/yr | 50% |
1.1.6
1.5 hours
Communicating an ROI that is impactful and reasonable is essential for locking in executive-level support for any initiative. Use this activity as an initial touchpoint to bring business and IT perspectives as part of building a robust business case for developing your BI strategy.
Emphasize that ROI is not fully realized after the first implementation, but comes as the platform is built upon iteratively and in an integrated fashion to mature capabilities over time.
In an effort to keep users satisfied, many organizations rush into implementing a BI platform and generating reports for their business users. BI is, first and foremost, a presentation layer; there are several stages in the data lifecycle where the data that BI visualizes can be compromised.
Without paying the appropriate amount of attention to the underlying data architecture and application integration, even the most sophisticated BI platforms will fall short of providing business users with a holistic view of company information.
In moving away from single application-level reporting, a strategy around data integration practices and technology is necessary before the resultant data can be passed to the BI platform for additional analyses and visualization.
As business intelligence is primarily a presentation layer that allows business users to visualize data and turn information into actionable decisions, there are a number of data management practices that precede BI in the flow of data.
The data warehouse structures source data in a manner that is more operationally focused. The Reporting & Analytics Strategy must inform the warehouse strategy on data needs and building a data warehouse to meet those needs.
The data warehouse is built from different sources that must be integrated and normalized to enable Business Intelligence. The Info-Tech integration and MDM blueprints will guide with their implementation.
A major roadblock to building an effective BI solution is a lack of accurate, timely, consistent, and relevant data. Use Info-Tech’s blueprint to refine your approach to data quality management.
Data quality, poor integration/P2P integration, poor data architecture are the primary barriers to truly leveraging BI, and a lot of companies haven’t gotten better in these areas.
– Shari Lava, Associate Vice-President, IT Research and Advisory Firm
Business intelligence is heavily reliant on the ability of an organization to mesh data from different sources together and create a holistic and accurate source of truth for users.
Useful analytics cannot be conducted if your business units define key business terms differently.
Finance may label customers as those who have transactional records with the organization, but Marketing includes leads who have not yet had any transactions as customers. Neglecting to note these seemingly small discrepancies in data definition will undermine efforts to combine data assets from traditionally siloed functional units.
In the stages prior to implementing any kind of BI platform, a top priority should be establishing common definitions for key business terms (customers, products, accounts, prospects, contacts, product groups, etc.).
As a preliminary step, document different definitions for the same business terms so that business users are aware of these differences before attempting to combine data to create custom reports.
Do you have common definitions of business terms?
1.2.1 Analyze the usage levels of your current BI programs/platform
1.2.2 Perform a survey to gather user perception of your current BI environment
1.2.3 Take an inventory of your current BI artifacts
Project Manager
Data Architect(s) or Enterprise Architect
Project Team
Current State Summary of BI Landscape
1.2.1 | 1.2.2 | 1.2.3 | 1.2.4 |
---|---|---|---|
Usage Insights | Perception Insights | BI Inventory Insights | Requirements Insights |
Strategy and Roadmap Formulation
Usage data reflects the consumption patterns of end users. By reviewing usage data, you can identify aspects of your BI program that are popular and those that are underutilized. It may present some opportunities for trimming some of the underutilized content.
Info-Tech Insight
Don’t forget some of the power users. They may perform analytics by accessing datasets directly or with the help of a query tool (even straight SQL statements). Their usage information is important. The next generation BI should provide consumption options for them.
Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment allows you to create a custom survey based on your current applications, generate a custom report that will help you visualize user satisfaction levels, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
1.2.1
2 hours
This activity helps you to locate usage data in your existing environment. It also helps you to review and analyze usage data to come up with a few findings.
a. Administrator console – limited to real-time or daily usage data. You may need to track usage data over for several days to identify patterns.
b. Info-Tech’s Application Portfolio Assessment (APA).
c. Other – be creative. Some may use an IT usage monitoring system or web analytics to track time users spent on the BI portal.
By Frequency | Real Time | Daily | Weekly | Yearly |
By Presentation Format | Report | Dashboard | Alert | Scorecard |
By Delivery | Web portal | Excel | Mobile application |
1.2.1
2 hours
3. Sort your collection of BI artifacts by usage. Discuss some of the reasons why some content is popular whereas some has no usage at all.
Popular BI Artifacts – Discuss improvements, opportunities and new artifacts
Unpopular BI Artifacts – Discuss retirement, improvements, and realigning information needs
4. Summarize your findings in the Usage Insights section of the BI Strategy and Roadmap Template.
In 1.2.1, we gathered the statistics for BI usage; it’s the hard data telling who uses what. However, it does not tell you the rationale, or the why, behind the usage. Gathering user perception and having conversations with your BI consumers is the key to bridging the gap.
User Perception Survey
User Interviews
Perception can be gathered by user interviews and surveys. Conducting user interviews takes time so it is a good practice to get some primary insights via survey before doing in-depth interviews in selected areas.
– Shari Lava, Associate Vice-President, IT Research and Advisory Firm
Find a data-related problem or opportunity
Ask open-ended discovery questions about stakeholder fears, hopes, and frustrations to identify a data-related problem that is clear, contained, and fixable. This is then to be written as a problem/opportunity statement.
Next, gather information to support a problem/opportunity statement:
Info-Tech has developed a BI survey framework to help existing BI practices gather user perception via survey. The framework is built upon best practices developed by McLean & Company.
The survey takes a comprehensive approach by examining your existing BI practices through the following lenses:
Demographics | Who are the users? From which department? |
---|---|
Usage | How is the current BI being used? |
People | Web portal |
Process | How good is your BI team from a user perspective? |
Data | How good is the BI data in terms of quality and usability? |
Technology | How good are your existing BI/reporting tools? |
Textual Feedback | The sky’s the limit. Tell us your comments and ideas via open-ended questions. |
Use Info-Tech’s BI End-User Satisfaction Survey Framework to develop a comprehensive BI survey tailored to your organization.
1.2.2
2 hours
This activity helps you to plan for a BI perception survey and subsequent interviews.
Collectively, the project team and the BI consuming departments should review the presentation and discuss these items:
Misalignment
Opportunities
Inefficiencies
Trends
Need detailed interviews?
Taking an inventory of your BI artifacts allows you to understand what deliverables have been developed over the years. Inventory taking should go beyond the BI content. You may want to include additional information products such as Excel spreadsheets, reports that are coming out of an Access database, and reports that are generated from front-end applications (e.g. Salesforce).
If you are currently using a BI platform, you have some BI artifacts (reports, scorecards, dashboards) that are developed within the platform itself.
1.2.3
2+ hours
This activity helps you to inventory your BI information artifacts and other related information artifacts.
Duplicated reports/ dashboards | Similar reports/ dashboards that may be able to merge | Excel and Access reports that are using undocumented, unconventional business logics | Application reports that need to be enhanced by additional data | Classify artifacts by BI Type |
1.2.4
2+ hours
This activity helps you to inventory your BI by report type.
Duplicated reports/dashboards | Similar reports/dashboards that may be able to merge | Excel and Access reports that are using undocumented, unconventional business logics | Application reports that need to be enhanced by additional data |
1.3.1 Create requirements gathering principles
1.3.2 Gather appropriate requirements
1.3.3 Organize and consolidate the outputs of requirements gathering activities
Project Manager
Data Architect(s) or Enterprise Architect
Project Team
Business Users
The challenges in requirements management often have underlying causes; find and eliminate the root causes rather than focusing on the symptoms.
Info-Tech Insight
Requirements gathering is the number one failure point for most development or procurement projects that don’t deliver value. This has been, and continues to be, the case as most organizations still don't get requirements gathering right. Overcoming organizational cynicism can be a major obstacle to clear when it is time to optimize the requirements gathering process.
Verifiable | It is stated in a way that can be tested. |
---|---|
Unambiguous | It is free of subjective terms and can only be interpreted in one way. |
Complete | It contains all relevant information. |
Consistent | It does not conflict with other requirements. |
Achievable | It is possible to accomplish given the budgetary and technological constraints. |
Traceable | It can be tracked from inception to testing. |
Unitary | It addresses only one thing and cannot be deconstructed into multiple requirements. |
Accurate | It is based on proven facts and correct information. |
Organizations can also track a requirement owner, rationale, priority level (must have vs. nice to have), and current status (approved, tested, etc.).
Info-Tech Insight
Requirements must be solution agnostic – they should focus on the underlying need rather than the technology required to satisfy the need.
1.3.1
1 hour
Effectiveness | Face-to-face interviews are preferred over phone interviews. |
Alignment | Clarify any misalignments, even the tiniest ones. |
Validation | Rephrase requirements at the end to validate requirements. |
Ideation | Use drawings and charts to explain ideas. |
Demonstration | Make use of Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions. |
Info-Tech Insight
Turn requirements gathering principles into house rules. The house rules should be available in every single requirements gathering session and the participants should revisit them when there are disagreements, confusion, or silence.
Info-Tech suggests four requirements management approaches based on project complexity and business significance. BI projects usually require the Strategic Approach in requirements management.
Approach | Definition | Recommended Strategy |
---|---|---|
Strategic Approach | High business significance and high project complexity merits a significant investment of time and resources in requirements gathering. | Treat the requirements gathering phase as a project within a project. A large amount of time should be dedicated to elicitation, business process mapping, and solution design. |
Fundamental Approach | High business significance and low project complexity merits a heavy emphasis on the elicitation phase to ensure that the project bases are covered and business value is realized. | Look to achieve quick wins and try to survey a broad cross-section of stakeholders during elicitation and validation. The elicitation phase should be highly iterative. Do not over-complicate the analysis and validation of a straightforward project. |
Calculated Approach | Low business significance and high project complexity merits a heavy emphasis on the analysis and validation phases to ensure that the solution meets the needs of users. | Allocate a significant amount of time to business process modeling, requirements categorization, prioritization, and solution modeling. |
Elementary Approach | Low business significance and low project complexity does not merit a high amount of rigor for requirements gathering. Do not rush or skip steps, but aim to be efficient. | Focus on basic elicitation techniques (e.g. unstructured interviews, open-ended surveys) and consider capturing requirements as user stories. Focus on efficiency to prevent project delays and avoid squandering resources. |
Info-Tech has identified four effective requirements gathering modes. During the requirements gathering process, you may need to switch between the four gathering modes to establish a thorough understanding of the information needs.
BI is a continually evolving program. BI artifacts that were developed in the past may not be relevant to the business anymore due to changes in the business and information usage. Revamping your BI program entails revisiting some of the BI requirements and/or gathering new BI requirements.
Requirements | User Stories | Rapid Prototyping |
---|---|---|
Gather requirements. Most importantly, understand the business needs and wants. | Leverage user stories to organize and make sense of the requirements. | Use a prototype to confirm requirements and show the initial draft to end users. |
Pain Mode: “I can’t access and manipulate data on my own...”
Decode Mode: Dig deeper: could this hint at a self-service use case?
Dream Mode: E.g. a sandbox area where I can play around with clean, integrated, well-represented data.
Profile Mode: E.g. another marketing analyst is currently using something similar.
ExampleMary has a spreadmart that keeps track of all campaigns. Maintaining and executing that spreadmart is time consuming.
Mary is asking for a mash-up data set that she can pivot on her own…
Upon reviewing the data and the prototype, Mary decided to use a heat map and included two more data points – tenure and lifetime value.
A spectrum of Business Intelligence solutions styles are available. Use Info-Tech’s BI Styles Tool to assess which business stakeholder will be best served by which style.
Style | Description | Strategic Importance (1-5) | Popularity (1-5) | Effort (1-5) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Standards Preformatted reports | Standard, preformatted information for backward-looking analysis. | 5 | 5 | 1 |
User-defined analyses | Pre-staged information where “pick lists” enable business users to filter (select) the information they wish to analyze, such as sales for a selected region during a selected previous timeframe. | 5 | 4 | 2 |
Ad-hoc analyses | Power users write their own queries to extract self-selected pre-staged information and then use the information to perform a user-created analysis. | 5 | 4 | 3 |
Scorecards and dashboards | Predefined business performance metrics about performance variables that are important to the organization, presented in a tabular or graphical format that enables business users to see at a glance how the organization is performing. | 4 | 4 | 3 |
Multidimensional analysis (OLAP) | Multidimensional analysis (also known as on-line analytical processing): Flexible tool-based, user-defined analysis of business performance and the underlying drivers or root causes of that performance. | 4 | 3 | 3 |
Alerts | Predefined analyses of key business performance variables, comparison to a performance standard or range, and communication to designated businesspeople when performance is outside the predefined performance standard or range. | 4 | 3 | 3 |
Advanced Analytics | Application of long-established statistical and/or operations research methods to historical business information to look backward and characterize a relevant aspect of business performance, typically by using descriptive statistics. | 5 | 3 | 4 |
Predictive Analytics | Application of long-established statistical and/or operations research methods and historical business information to predict, model, or simulate future business and/or economic performance and potentially prescribe a favored course of action for the future. | 5 | 3 | 5 |
1.3.2
2-6 hours
Using the approaches discussed on previous slides, start a dialogue with business users to confirm existing requirements and develop new ones.
For existing BI artifacts – Invite existing users of those artifacts.
For new BI development – Invite stakeholders at the executive level to understand the business operation and their needs and wants. This is especially important if their department is new to BI.
The Setting | The Characters | The Venues | The Activities | The Future | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Example | Customers are asking for a bundle discount. | CMO and the marketing analysts want to… | …the information should be available in the portal, mobile, and Excel. | …information is then used in the bi-weekly pricing meeting to discuss… | …bundle information should contain historical data in a graphical format to help executives. |
Requirements are too broad in some situations and too detailed in others. In the previous step we developed user stories to provide context. Now you need to define requirement categories and gather detailed requirements.
Category | Subcategory | Sample Requirements |
---|---|---|
Data | Granularity | Individual transaction |
Transformation | Transform activation date to YYYY-MM format | |
Selection Criteria | Client type: consumer. Exclude SMB and business clients. US only. Recent three years | |
Fields Required | Consumer band, Region, Submarket… | |
Functionality | Filters | Filters required on the dashboard: date range filter, region filter… |
Drill Down Path | Drill down from a summary report to individual transactions | |
Analysis Required | Cross-tab, time series, pie chart | |
Visual Requirements | Mock-up | See attached drawing |
Section | The dashboard will be presented using three sections | |
Conditional Formatting | Below-average numbers are highlighted | |
Security | Mobile | The dashboard needs to be accessed from mobile devices |
Role | Regional managers will get a subset of the dashboard according to the region | |
Users | John, Mary, Tom, Bob, and Dave | |
Export | Dashboard data cannot be exported into PDF, text, or Excel formats | |
Performance | Speed | A BI artifact must be loaded in three seconds |
Latency | Two seconds response time when a filter is changed | |
Capacity | Be able to serve 50 concurrent users with the performance expected | |
Control | Governance | Govern by the corporate BI standards |
Regulations | Meet HIPPA requirements | |
Compliance | Meet ISO requirements |
Must Have | Requirements that mustbe implemented for the solution to be considered successful. |
---|---|
Should Have | Requirements that are high priority and should be included in the solution if possible. |
Could Have | Requirements that are desirable but not necessary and could be included if resources are available. |
Won't Have | Requirements that won’t be in the next release but will be considered for the future releases. |
The MoSCoW model was introduced by Dai Clegg of Oracle UK in 1994.
Prioritization is the process of ranking each requirement based on its importance to project success. Hold a separate meeting for the domain SMEs, implementation SMEs, project managers, and project sponsors to prioritize the requirements list. At the conclusion of the meeting, each requirement should be assigned a priority level. The implementation SMEs will use these priority levels to ensure that efforts are targeted towards the proper requirements and the plan features available on each release. Use the MoSCoW Model of Prioritization to effectively order requirements.
1.3.3
1-4 hours
Category | Subcategory |
---|---|
Data | Granularity |
Transformation | |
Selection Criteria | |
Fields Required | |
Functionality | Filters |
Drill Down Path | |
Analysis Required | |
Visual Requirements | Mock-up |
Section | |
Conditional Formatting | |
Security | Mobile |
Role | |
Users | |
Export | |
Performance | Speed |
Latency | |
Capacity | |
Control | Governance |
Regulations | |
Compliance |
Create requirement buckets and classify requirements.
As you progress through each phase, document findings and ideas as they arise. At phase end, hold a brainstorming session with the project team focused on documenting findings and ideas and substantiating them into improvement actions.
Ask yourself how BI or analytics can be used to address the gaps and explore opportunities uncovered in each phase. For example, in Phase 1, how do current BI capabilities impede the realization of the business vision?
1.3.4
1-2 hours
High Business Value, Low Effort | High Business Value, High Effort |
Low Business Value, High Effort | Low Business Value, High Effort |
Sample Phase 1 Findings | Found two business objectives that are not supported by BI/analytics |
---|---|
Some executives still think BI is reporting | |
Some confusion around operational reporting and BI | |
Data quality plays a big role in BI | |
Many executives are not sure about the BI ROI or asking for one |
Establish the business context
To begin the workshop, your project team will be taken through a series of activities to establish the overall business vision, mission, objectives, goals, and key drivers. This information will serve as the foundation for discerning how the revamped BI strategy needs to enable business users.
Create a comprehensive documentation of your current BI environment
Our analysts will take your project team through a series of activities that will facilitate an assessment of current BI usage and artifacts, and help you design an end-user interview survey to elicit context around BI usage patterns.
Establish new BI requirements
Our analysts will guide your project team through frameworks for eliciting and organizing requirements from business users, and then use those frameworks in exercises to gather some actual requirements from business stakeholders.
Practice Improvement Metrics | Data Collection and Calculation | Expected Improvement |
---|---|---|
# of groups participated in the current state assessment | The number of groups joined the current assessment using Info-Tech’s BI Practice Assessment Tool | Varies; the tool can accommodate up to five groups |
# of risks mitigated | Derive from your risk register | At least two to five risks will be identified and mitigated |
Intangible Metrics:
BI success is not based solely on the technology it runs on; technology cannot mask gaps in capabilities. You must be capable in your environment, and data management, data quality, and related data practices must be strong. Otherwise, the usefulness of the intelligence suffers. The best BI solution does not only provide a technology platform, but also addresses the elements that surround the platform. Look beyond tools and holistically assess the maturity of your BI practice with input from both the BI consumer and provider perspectives.
Understand the Business Context to Rationalize Your BI Landscape | Evaluate Your Current BI Practice | Create a BI Roadmap for Continuous Improvement |
---|---|---|
Establish the Business Context
|
Assess Your Current BI Maturity
|
Construct a BI Initiative Roadmap
|
Access Existing BI Environment
|
Envision BI Future State
|
Plan for Continuous Improvement
|
Undergo Requirements Gathering
|
Step 1: Assess Your Current BI Practice
Step 2: Envision a Future State for Your BI Practice
Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.
Complete these steps on your own, or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that help you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.
Proposed Time to Completion: 1-2 weeks
Start with an analyst kick-off call:
Then complete these activities…
With these tools & templates:
BI Practice Assessment Tool
BI Strategy and Roadmap Template
Review findings with an analyst:
Then complete these activities…
With these tools & templates:
BI Practice Assessment Tool
BI Strategy and Roadmap Template
2.1.1 Perform multidimensional SWOT analyses
2.1.2 Assess current BI and analytical capabilities, Document challenges, constraints, opportunities
2.1.3 Review the results of your current state assessment
Project Manager
Data Architect(s) or Enterprise Architect
Project Team
Strengths Best practices, what is working well |
Weaknesses Inefficiencies, errors, gaps, shortcomings |
Opportunities Review internal and external drivers |
Threats Market trends, disruptive forces |
While SWOT is not a new concept, you can add value to SWOT by:
Info-Tech Insight
Consider a SWOT with two formats: a private SWOT worksheet and a public SWOT session. Participants will be providing suggestions anonymously while solicited suggestions will be discussed in the public SWOT session to further the discussion.
2.1.1
1-2 hours
This activity will take your project team through a holistic SWOT analysis to gather a variety of stakeholder perception of the current BI practice.
Group 1 Provider Group E.g. The BI Team
Group 2 Consumer Group E.g. Business End Users
A way to categorize your analytics maturity to understand where you are currently and what next steps would be best to increase your BI maturity.
Buy-in and Data Culture
Determines if there is enterprise-wide buy-in for developing business intelligence and if a data-driven culture exists.
Business–IT Alignment
Examines if current BI and analytics operations are appropriately enabling the business objectives.
Governance Structure
Focuses on whether or not there is adequate governance in place to provide guidance and structure for BI activities.
Organization Structure and Talent
Pertains to how BI operations are distributed across the overall organizational structure and the capabilities of the individuals involved.
Process
Reviews analytics-related processes and policies and how they are created and enforced throughout the organization.
Data
Deals with analytical data in terms of the level of integration, data quality, and usability.
Technology
Explores the opportunities in building a fit-for-purpose analytics platform and consolidation opportunities.
Leverage a BI strategy to revamp your BI program to strive for a high analytics maturity level. In the future you should be doing more than just traditional BI. You will perform self-service BI, predictive analytics, and data science.
Ad Hoc | Developing | Defined | Managed | Trend Setting | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Questions | What’s wrong? | What happened? | What is happening? | What happened, is happening, and will happen? | What if? So what? |
Scope | One business problem at a time | One particular functional area | Multiple functional areas | Multiple functional areas in an integrated fashion | Internal plus internet scale data |
Toolset | Excel, Access, primitive query tools | Reporting tools or BI | BI | BI, business analytics tools | Plus predictive platforms, data science tools |
Delivery Model | IT delivers ad hoc reports | IT delivers BI reports | IT delivers BI reports and some self-service BI | Self-service BI and report creation at the business units | Plus predictive models and data science projects |
Mindset | Firefighting using data | Manage using data | Analyze using data; shared tooling | Data is an asset, shared data | Data driven |
BI Org. Structure | Data analysts in IT | BI | BI program | BI CoE | Data Innovation CoE |
Info-Tech Insight
Assessing current and target states is only the beginning. The real value comes from the interpretation and analysis of the results. Use visualizations of multiple viewpoints and discuss the results in groups to come up with the most effective ideas for your strategy and roadmap.
2.1.2
2-3 hours
Use the BI Practice Assessment Tool to establish a baseline for your current BI capabilities and maturity.
Info-Tech suggests the following groups participate in the completion of the assessment to holistically assess BI and to uncover misalignment:
Providers | Consumers | |||
---|---|---|---|---|
CIO & BI Management | BI Work Groups (developers, analysts, modelers) | Business Unit #1 | Business Unit #2 | Business Unit #3 |
Info-Tech Insight
Discuss the rationale for your answers as a group. Document the comments and observations as they may be helpful in formulating the final strategy and roadmap.
2.1.3
2-3 hours
The tool provides a brief synopsis of your current BI state. Review the details of your maturity level and see where this description fits your organization and where there may be some discrepancies. Add additional comments to your current state summary in the BI Strategy and Roadmap Document.
In addition to reviewing the attributes of your maturity level, consider the following:
2.1.3
2-3 hours
2. Tab 3 will also visualize a breakdown of your maturity by BI practice dimension. Use this graphic as a preliminary method to identify where your organization is excelling and where it may need improvement.
Better Practices
Consider: What have you done in the areas where you perform well?
Candidates for Improvement
Consider: What can you do to improve these areas? What are potential barriers to improvement?
2.2.1 Define guiding principles for the future state
2.2.2 Define the target state of your BI practice
2.2.3 Confirm requirements for BI Styles by management group
2.2.4 Analyze gaps in your BI practice and generate improvement activities and objectives
2.2.5 Define the critical success factors for future BI
2.2.6 Identify potential risks for your future state and create a mitigation plan
Project Manager
Data Architect(s) or Enterprise Architect
Project Team
Envisioning a BI future state is essentially architecting the future for your BI program. It is very similar to enterprise architecture (EA). Guiding principles are widely used in enterprise architecture. This best practice should also be used in BI envisioning.
2.2.1
1-2 hours
Guiding principles are broad statements that are fundamental to how your organization will go about its activities. Use this as an opportunity to gather relevant stakeholders and solidify how your BI practice should perform moving forward.
Awareness | Buy-in | Business-IT Alignment | Governance | Org. Structure; People | Process; Policies; Standards | Data | Technology |
At the end of the day, BI makes data and information available to the business communities. It has to be fit for purpose and relevant to the business. Prototypes are an effective way to ensure relevant deliverables are provided to the necessary users. Prototyping makes your future state a lot closer and a lot more business friendly.
Document essential findings in Info-Tech’s BI Strategy and Roadmap Template.
Info-Tech Insight
Assessing current and target states is only the beginning. The real value comes from the interpretation and analyses of the results. Use visualizations of multiple viewpoints and discuss the results in groups to come up with the most effective ideas for your strategy and roadmap.
2.2.2
2 hours
This exercise takes your team through establishing the future maturity of your BI practice across several dimensions.
The business and IT groups should get together separately and determine the target state maturity of each of the BI practice components:
2.2.2
2 hours
2. The target state levels from the two groups will be averaged in the column “Target State Level.” The assessment tool will automatically calculate the gaps between future state value and the current state maturity determined in Step 2.1. Significant gaps in practice maturity will be highlighted in red; smaller or non-existent gaps will appear green.
2.2.3
1-2 hours
The information needs for each executive is unique to their requirements and management style. During this exercise you will determine the reporting and analytical needs for an executive in regards to content, presentation and cadence and then select the BI style that suite them best.
Having completed both current and target state assessments, the BI Practice Assessment Tool allows you to compare the results from multiple angles.
At a higher level, you can look at your maturity level:
At a detailed level, you can drill down to the dimensional level and item level.
At a detailed level, you can drill down to the dimensional level and item level.
2.2.4
2 hours
This interpretation exercise helps you to make sense of the BI practice assessment results to provide valuable inputs for subsequent strategy and roadmap formulation.
Begin this exercise by reviewing the heat map and identifying:
Consider: Is the target state feasible and achievable? What are ways we can improve incrementally in this area? What is the priority for addressing this gap?
Consider: Can we learn from those areas? Are we setting the bar too low for our capabilities?
2.2.4
2 hours
2. Discuss the differences in the current and target state maturity level descriptions. Questions to ask include:
2.2.4
2 hours
3. Have the same group members reconvene and discuss the recommendations at the BI practice dimension level on Tab 5. of the BI Practice Assessment Tool. These recommendations can be used as improvement actions or translated into objectives for building your BI capabilities.
The heat map displayed the largest gap between target state and current state in the technology dimension. The detailed drill-down chart will further illustrate which aspect(s) of the technology dimension is/are showing the most room for improvement in order to better direct your objective and initiative creation.
Critical success factors (CSFs) are the essential factors or elements required for ensuring the success of your BI program. They are used to inform organizations with things they should focus on to be successful.
…a data culture is essential to the success of analytics. Being involved in a lot of Bay Area start-ups has shown me that those entrepreneurs that are born with the data DNA, adopt the data culture and BI naturally. Other companies should learn from these start-ups and grow the data culture to ensure BI adoption.
– Cameran Hetrick, Senior Director of Data Science & Analytics, thredUP
2.2.5
2 hours
Create critical success factors that are important to both BI providers and BI consumers.
BI Provider (aka IT) | BI Consumer (aka Business) |
What needs to be put in place to ensure that this objective is achieved?
The answer to the question is your candidate CSF. Write CSFs on sticky notes and stick them by the relevant objective.
As you evaluate candidate CSFs, you may uncover new objectives for achieving your future state BI.
A risk matrix is a useful tool that allows you to track risks on two dimensions: probability and impact. Use this matrix to help organize and prioritize risk, as well as develop mitigation strategies and contingency plans appropriately.
Info-Tech Insight
Tackling risk mitigation is essentially purchasing insurance. You cannot insure everything – focus your investments on mitigating risks with a reasonably high impact and high probability.
These are some of the most common BI risks based on Info-Tech’s research:
Low Impact | Medium Impact | High Impact | |
---|---|---|---|
High Probability |
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|
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Medium Probability |
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Low Probability |
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2.2.6
1 hour
As part of developing your improvement actions, use this activity to brainstorm some high-level plans for mitigating risks associated with those actions.
Example:
Users find the BI tool interface too confusing.
A. Reducing its probability
B. Reducing its impact
C. Reducing both
Option A: Brainstorm ways to reduce risk probability
E.g. The probability of the above risk may be reduced by user training. With training, the probability of confused end users will be reduced.
Option B: Brainstorm ways to reduce risk impact
E.g. The impact can be reduced by ensuring having two end users validate each other’s reports before making a major decision.
As you progress through each phase, document findings and ideas as they arise. By phase end, hold a brainstorming session with the project team focused on documenting findings and ideas and substantiating them into improvement actions.
Ask yourself how BI or analytics can be used to address the gaps and explore opportunities uncovered in each phase. For example, in Phase 1, how do current BI capabilities impede the realization of the business vision?
2.2.7
1-2 hours
High Business Value, Low Effort | High Business Value, High Effort |
Low Business Value, High Effort | Low Business Value, High Effort |
Sample Phase 2 Findings | Found a gap between the business expectation and the existing BI content they are getting. |
---|---|
Our current maturity level is “Level 2 – Operational.” Almost everyone thinks we should be at least “Level 3 – Tactical” with some level 4 elements. | |
Found an error in a sales report. A quick fix is identified. | |
The current BI program is not able to keep up with the demand. |
2.1.1
Determine your current BI maturity level
The analyst will take your project team through Info-Tech’s BI Practice Assessment Tool, which collects perspectives from BI consumer and provider groups on multiple facets of your BI practice in order to establish a current maturity level.
2.2.1
Define guiding principles for your target BI state
Using enterprise architecture principles as a starting point, our analyst will facilitate exercises to help your team establish high-level standards for your future BI practice.
2.2.2-2.2.3
Establish your desired BI patterns and matching functionalities
In developing your BI practice, your project team will have to decide what BI-specific capabilities are most important to your organization. Our analyst will take your team through several BI patterns that Info-Tech has identified and discuss how to bridge the gap between these patterns, linking them to specific functional requirements in a BI solution.
2.2.4-2.2.5
Analyze the gaps in your BI practice capabilities
Our analyst will guide your project team through a number of visualizations and explanations produced by our assessment tool in order to pinpoint the problem areas and generate improvement ideas.
The benefit of creating a comprehensive and actionable roadmap is twofold: not only does it keep BI providers accountable and focused on creating incremental improvement, but a roadmap helps to build momentum around the overall project, provides a continuous delivery of success stories, and garners grassroots-level support throughout the organization for BI as a key strategic imperative.
Understand the Business Context to Rationalize Your BI Landscape | Evaluate Your Current BI Practice | Create a BI Roadmap for Continuous Improvement |
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Establish the Business Context
| Assess Your Current BI Maturity
| Construct a BI Initiative Roadmap
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Access Existing BI Environment
| Envision BI Future State
| Plan for Continuous Improvement
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Undergo Requirements Gathering
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Step 1: Establish Your BI Initiative Roadmap
Step 2: Identify Opportunities to Enhance Your BI Practice
Step 3: Create Analytics Strategy
Step 4: Define CSF and metrics to monitor success of BI and analytics
Practice Improvement Metrics | Data Collection and Calculation | Expected Improvement | |
Program Level Metrics | Efficiency
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Comprehensiveness
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Learn more about the CIO Business Vision program.
Tap into the results of Info-Tech’s CIO Business Vision diagnostic to monitor the changes in business-user satisfaction as you implement the initiatives in your BI improvement roadmap.
Call 1-888-670-8889 or email GuidedImplementations@InfoTech.com for more information.
Complete these steps on your own or call us to complete a guided implementation. A guided implementation is a series of 2-3 advisory calls that helps you execute each phase of a project. They are included in most advisory memberships.
Proposed Time to Completion: 1-2 weeks
Step 3.1: Construct a BI Improvement Initiative Roadmap
Start with an analyst kick off call:
Then complete these activities…
With these tools & templates:
BI Initiatives and Roadmap Tool
BI Strategy and Roadmap Template
Step 3.2: Continuous Improvement Opportunities for BI
Review findings with analyst:
Then complete these activities…
With these tools & templates:
BI Strategy and Roadmap Executive Presentation Template
3.1.1 Characterize individual improvement objectives and activities ideated in previous phases.
3.1.2 Synthesize and detail overall BI improvement initiatives.
3.1.3 Create a plan of action by placing initiatives on a roadmap.
Project Manager
Project Team
When developing initiatives, all components of the initiative need to be considered, from its objectives and goals to its benefits, risks, costs, effort required, and relevant stakeholders.
Determining the dependencies that exist between objectives will enable the creation of unique initiatives with associated to-do items or tasks.
BI Initiatives and Roadmap Tool
Use the BI Initiatives and Roadmap Tool to develop comprehensive improvement initiatives and add them to a BI strategy improvement roadmap.
Tab 1. Instructions | Use this tab to get an understanding as to how the tool works. |
Tab 2. Inputs | Use this tab to customize the inputs used in the tool. |
Tab 3. Activities Repository | Use this tab to list and prioritize activities, to determine dependencies between them, and build comprehensive initiatives with them. |
Tab 4. Improvement Initiatives | Use this tab to develop detailed improvement initiatives that will form the basis of the roadmap. Map these initiatives to activities from Tab 3. |
Tab 5. Improvement Roadmap | Use this tab to create your BI strategy improvement roadmap, assigning timelines and accountability to initiatives and tasks, and to monitor your project performance over time. |
3.1.1
3.1.1
2 hours
Screenshot of Tab 3. BI Activities Repository, with samples improvement activities, dependencies, statuses, and priorities
Revisit the outputs of your current state assessment and note which activities have already been completed in the “Status” column, to avoid duplication of your efforts.
When classifying the status of items in your activity repository, distinguish between broader activities (potential initiatives) and granular activities (tasks).
3.1.2
1.5 hours
Screenshot of the Improvement Initiative template, to be used for developing comprehensive initiatives
The image is a screenshot of the Improvement Initiative template, to be used for developing comprehensive initiatives.">
Building a comprehensive BI program will be a gradual process involving a variety of stakeholders. Different initiatives in your roadmap will either be completed sequentially or in parallel to one another, given dependencies and available resources. The improvement roadmap should capture and represent this information.
To determine the order in which main initiatives should be completed, exercises such as a value–effort map can be very useful.
Initiatives that are high value–low effort are found in the upper left quadrant and are bolded; These may be your four primary initiatives. In addition, initiative five is valuable to the business and critical to the project’s success, so it too is a priority despite requiring high effort. Note that you need to consider dependencies to prioritize these key initiatives.
This exercise is best performed using a white board and sticky notes, and axes can be customized to fit your needs (E.g. cost, risk, time, etc.).
3.1.3
45 minutes
The BI Strategy Improvement Roadmap (Tab 5 of the BI Initiatives and Roadmap Tool) has been populated with your primary initiatives and related tasks. Read the instructions provided at the top of Tab 5.
Use a proprietary presentation template
Develop your proprietary presentation template with:
Following the approval of your roadmap, begin to plan the implementation of your first initiatives.
Info-Tech Insight
At this point, it is likely that you already have the support to implement a data quality improvement roadmap. This meeting is about the specifics and the ROI.
Maximize support by articulating the value of the data quality improvement strategy for the organization’s greater information management capabilities. Emphasize the business requirements and objectives that will be enhanced as a result of tackling the recommended initiatives, and note any additional ramifications of not doing so.
Use the BI Strategy and Roadmap Executive Presentation Template to present your most important findings and brilliant ideas to the business executives and ensure your BI program is endorsed. Business executives can also learn about how the BI strategy empowers them and how they can help in the BI journey.
3.2.1 Construct a concrete policy to integrate Excel use with your new BI strategy.
3.2.2 Map out the foundation for a BI Ambassador network.
Project Manager
Project Team
Additional Business Users
3.2.1
4 hours
Construct a policy around Excel use to ensure that Excel documents are created and shared in a manner that does not compromise the integrity of your overall BI program.
Category | To Do: | Policy Context |
---|---|---|
Allowed | Discuss what makes these use cases ideal for BI. | Document use cases, scenarios, examples, and reasons that allow Excel as an information artifact. |
Not Allowed | Discuss why these cases should be avoided. | Document forbidden use cases, scenarios, examples, and reasons that use Excel to generate information artifacts. |
Not Sure | Discuss the confusions; clarify the gray area. | Document clarifications and advise how end users can get help in those “gray area” cases. |
BI ambassadors are influential individuals in the organization that may be proficient at using BI tools but are passionate about analytics. The network of ambassadors will be IT’s eyes, ears, and even mouth on the frontline with users. Ambassadors will promote BI, communicate any messages IT may have, and keep tabs on user satisfaction.
You need to motivate ambassadors to take on this additional responsibility. Make sure the BI ambassadors are recognized in their business units when they go above and beyond in promoting BI.
Reward Approach | Reward Type | Description |
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Privileges | High Priority Requests | Given their high usage and high visibility, ambassadors’ BI information requests should be given a higher priority. |
First Look at New BI Development | Share the latest BI updates with ambassadors before introducing them to the organization. Ambassadors may even be excited to test out new functionality. | |
Recognition | Featured in Communications | BI ambassadors’ use cases and testimonials can be featured in BI communications. Be sure to create a formal announcement introducing the ambassadors to the organization. |
BI Ambassador Certificate | A certificate is a formal way to recognize their efforts. They can also publicly display the certificate in their workspace. | |
Rewards | Appointed by Senior Executives | Have the initial request to be a BI ambassador come from a senior executive to flatter the ambassador and position the role as a reward or an opportunity for success. |
BI Ambassador Awards | Award an outstanding BI ambassador for the year. The award should be given by the CEO in a major corporate event. |
3.2.2
2 hours
Identify individuals within your organization to act as ambassadors for BI and a bridge between IT and business users.
A next generation BI not only provides a platform that mirrors business requirements, but also creates a flexible environment that empowers business users to explore data assets without having to go back and forth with IT to complete queries.
Business users are generally not interested in the underlying architecture or the exact data lineages; they want access to the data that matters most for decision-making purposes.
It comes in the form of structural metadata (information about the spaces that contain data) and descriptive metadata (information pertaining to the data elements themselves), in order to answer questions such as:
By creating effective metadata, business users are able to make connections between and bring together data sources from multiple areas, creating the opportunity for holistic insight generation.
Like BI, metadata lies in the Information Dimension layer of our data management framework.
The metadata needs to be understood before building anything. You need to identify fundamentals of the data, who owns not only that data, but also its metadata. You need to understand where the consolidation is happening and who owns it. Metadata is the core driver and cost saver for building warehouses and requirements gathering.
– Albert Hui, Principal, Data Economist
In order to maximize your ROI on business intelligence, it needs to be treated less like a one-time endeavor and more like a practice to be continually improved upon.
Though the BI strategy provides the overall direction, the BI operating model – which encompasses organization structure, processes, people, and application functionality – is the primary determinant of efficacy with respect to information delivery. The alterations made to the operating model occur in the short term to improve the final deliverables for business users.
An optimal BI operating model satisfies three core requirements:
Timeliness
Effectiveness
Bring tangible benefits of your revamped BI strategy to business users by critically assessing how your organization delivers business intelligence and identifying opportunities for increased operational efficiency.
Assess and Optimize BI Operations
Focus on delivering timely, quality, and affordable information to enable fast and effective business decisions
Organizations new to business intelligence or with immature BI capabilities are under the impression that simply getting the latest-and-greatest tool will provide the insights business users are looking for.
BI technology can only be as effective as the processes surrounding it and the people leveraging it. Organizations need to take the time to select and implement a BI suite that aligns with business goals and fosters end-user adoption.
As an increasing number of companies turn to business intelligence technology, vendors are responding by providing BI and analytics platforms with more and more features.
Our vendor landscape will simplify the process of selecting a BI and analytics solution by:
Differentiating between the platforms and features vendors are offering.
Detailing a robust framework for requirements gathering to pinpoint your organization’s needs.
Developing a high-level plan for implementation.
Select and Implement a Business Intelligence and Analytics Solution
Find the diamond in your data-rough using the right BI & Analytics solution
3.1.1-3.1.3
Construct a BI improvement initiative roadmap
During these activities, your team will consolidate the list of BI initiatives generated from the assessments conducted in previous phases, assign timelines to each action, prioritize them using a value–effort matrix, and finally produce a roadmap for implementing your organization’s BI improvement strategy.
3.2
Identify continuous improvement opportunities for BI
Our analyst team will work with your organization to ideate supplementary programs to support your BI strategy. Defining Excel use cases that are permitted and prohibited in conjunction with your BI strategy, as well as structuring an internal BI ambassador network, are a few extra initiatives that can enhance your BI improvement plans.
A BI program is not a static project that is created once and remains unchanged. Your strategy must be treated as a living platform to be revisited and revitalized in order to provide effective enablement of business decision making. Develop a BI strategy that propels your organization by building it on business goals and objectives, as well as comprehensive assessments that quantitatively and qualitatively evaluate your current BI capabilities.
The closer you align your new BI platform to real business interests, the stronger will be the buy-in, realized value, and groundswell of enthusiastic adoption. Ultimately, getting this phase right sets the stage to best realize a strong ROI for your investment in the people, processes, and technology that will be your next generation BI platform.
BI success is not based solely on the technology it runs on; technology cannot mask gaps in capabilities. You must be capable in your environment – data management, data quality, and related data practices must be strong, otherwise the usefulness of the intelligence suffers. The best BI solution does not only provide a technology platform, but also addresses the elements that surround the platform. Look beyond tools and holistically assess the maturity of your BI practice with input from both the BI consumer and provider perspectives.
Style | Description | Strategic Importance (1-5) | Popularity (1-5) | Effort (1-5) |
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Standards Preformatted reports | Standard, preformatted information for backward-looking analysis. | 5 | 5 | 1 |
User-defined analyses | Pre-staged information where “pick lists” enable business users to filter (select) the information they wish to analyze, such as sales for a selected region during a selected previous timeframe. | 5 | 4 | 2 |
Ad-hoc analyses | Power users write their own queries to extract self-selected pre-staged information and then use the information to perform a user-created analysis. | 5 | 4 | 3 |
Scorecards and dashboards | Predefined business performance metrics about performance variables that are important to the organization, presented in a tabular or graphical format that enables business users to see at a glance how the organization is performing. | 4 | 4 | 3 |
Multidimensional analysis (OLAP) | Multidimensional analysis (also known as On-line analytical processing): Flexible tool-based user-defined analysis of business performance and the underlying drivers or root causes of that performance. | 4 | 3 | 3 |
Alerts | Predefined analyses of key business performance variables, comparison to a performance standard or range, and communication to designated businesspeople when performance is outside the predefined performance standard or range. | 4 | 3 | 3 |
Advanced Analytics | Application of long-established statistical and/or operations research methods to historical business information to look backward and characterize a relevant aspect of business performance, typically by using descriptive statistics | 5 | 3 | 4 |
Predictive Analytics | Application of long-established statistical and/or operations research methods to historical business information to predict, model, or simulate future business and/or economic performance and potentially prescribe a favored course of action for the future | 5 | 3 | 5 |
A comprehensive BI strategy needs to be developed under the umbrella of an overall IT strategy. Specifically, creating a BI strategy is contributing to helping IT mature from a firefighter to a strategic partner that has close ties with business units.
1. Determine mandate and scope | 2. Assess drivers and constraints | 3. Evaluate current state of IT | 4. Develop a target state vision | 5. Analyze gaps and define initiatives | 6. Build a roadmap | 8. Revamp | 7. Execute |
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Mandate | Business drivers | Holistic assessments | Vision and mission | Initiatives | Business-driven priorities | ||
Scope | External drivers | Focus-area specific assessments | Guiding principles | Risks | |||
Project charter | Opportunities to innovate | Target state vision | Execution schedule | ||||
Implications | Objectives and measures |
This BI strategy blueprint is rooted in our road-tested and proven IT strategy framework as a systematic method of tackling strategy development.
Albert Hui is a cofounder of Data Economist, a data-consulting firm based in Toronto, Canada. His current assignment is to redesign Scotiabank’s Asset Liability Management for its Basel III liquidity compliance using Big Data technology. Passionate about technology and problem solving, Albert is an entrepreneur and result-oriented IT technology leader with 18 years of experience in consulting and software industry. His area of focus is on data management, specializing in Big Data, business intelligence, and data warehousing. Beside his day job, he also contributes to the IT community by writing blogs and whitepapers, book editing, and speaking at technology conferences. His recent research and speaking engagement is on machine learning on Big Data.
Albert holds an MBA from the University of Toronto and a master’s degree in Industrial Engineering. He has twin boys and enjoys camping and cycling with them in his spare time.
Cameran is the Senior Director of Analytics and Data Science at thredUP, a startup inspiring a new generation to think second hand first. There she helps drives top line growth through advanced and predictive analytics. Previously, she served as the Director of Data Science at VMware where she built and led the data team for End User Computing. Before moving to the tech industry, she spent five years at The Disneyland Resort setting ticket and hotel prices and building models to forecast attendance. Cameran holds an undergraduate degree in Economics/Mathematics from UC Santa Barbara and graduated with honors from UC Irvine's MBA program.
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