What is a business intelligence data architecture strategy (BIDAS), and why do you need one? Odds are your company already has developed, invested in and maintains several technologies to deliver a variety of reporting solutions. How do you know when a technology is no longer beneficial or that users are still effectively utilizing the BI environment? Perhaps a business user has seen a demo of a new tool and would like to purchase it to fill a specific gap in their reporting needs. By creating a BIDAS, you could better align technology to the requirements of the business in order to effectively meet or exceed their needs.
A BIDAS is a comprehensive review of the current and future state of the reporting environment for your company. This document is considered a living document that can and will be modified as business strategies and technology change. It will contain information on at least the following areas of your BI environment:
- Strategic vision,
- Current state,
- Future state,
- Logical architecture,
- Physical architecture, and
- Usage analysis.
In most enterprises, there is the need to support three general areas of reporting: operational, tactical and strategic. For the purpose of this article, I define each as follows.
- Operational reporting supports the day-to-day operations of your company at a line-manager level. Examples would include transaction details on assets sold or the number of hamburgers sold. These types of reports have a limited life span and are valid only for a short time frame.
- Tactical reporting supports summarized views of the operation data used by a mid-level manager. Examples would include total volume for the week, month or year to date and net revenue consolidated from all transactional systems for a specific period of time.
- Strategic reporting supports highly summarized views or dashboards to highlight specific areas of interest in the enterprise. These reports are targeted at high-level management and generally show quick views of important information. Examples include trend analysis, performance metrics (actual versus forecast) and service level agreement compliance.
It is important to understand the granularity of the reporting that you are attempting to support across your company. By understanding how your company consumes and uses its data, you will be able to better define a strategy to support your needs.
Strategic Vision
To begin the process of developing a BIDAS, you must learn and document your business’s objectives and strategies to help formulate your strategic vision. This can be done by reviewing annual stockholder reports, reading internal documents or setting up interviews with key executives. Once you have acquired an initial list, meet with key stakeholders to ensure the list is accurate and has been prioritized. This will ensure that you start building your documentation with a proper foundation aligned with your business.
Figure 1: Example Business Objectives 
BI and reporting must deliver value that aligns with the business objectives, strategies and priorities. While the business is trying to execute all of the objectives throughout the year, you must rank each with a priority for available BI resources. By assigning each objective a BI priority, you and the business will have a better understanding of the order the projects may take in the upcoming year. Projects can then be evaluated for their overall contribution to the BI strategy by determining how a particular project helps align with the business strategy. IT departments always have limited resources; therefore it is crucial to maximize what projects they are involved in by leveraging how a project helps achieve business strategy. For example, a project to create and use data mining for cross-selling opportunities (BI priority 3) would align with the business strategy of increasing market share. However by reviewing the example Figure 1, a priority 3 project should not be started until BI priorities 1 and 2 (as assigned by the business leads) are nearing completion or resources are available.
