Over the last decade, many large information technology (IT) shops have undergone a dizzying array of change including outsourcing, insourcing, organizational realignments, new CIOs and new technologies. This turmoil has left many large IT shops without the fundamentals for providing excellent business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing services to their customers. As if that wasn't enough, many stovepipe warehouses developed during the last 10 years will need to be integrated (thus redesigned and combined) to meet customer demands at reasonable expense over the next 10 years. What's going to insure that IT is far more successful at this than it has been? The answer is an enterprise business intelligence center of excellence (CoE).
Today's smart service vendors in the business intelligence, data warehousing and data mining arena are establishing centers of excellence in an effort to provide businesses what many internal IT groups are not – expert one-stop shopping. A number of big name vendors and many smaller ones are staking a claim to the business intelligence services market through formation of centers of excellence. It could well be that big blue's recent acquisition of PwC Consulting was partly founded in acquiring just such expertise.
How do we know if we are excellent at the basics? Excellence can be defined and measured by applying a framework that clearly identifies the differentiators. At the highest level, businesses that have truly knowledgeable business intelligence and data warehousing people implement technology that works, provides clean usable data and uses proven processes to consistently maintain value (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Pillars of Success in BI and Data Warehousing
Measuring the degree of excellence is accomplished through use of the capability maturity model (CMM) against each of the pillars of success. Many organizations will find their CMM rating to be one or less in one or more of these pillars, while excellence requires a rating of two to three. A center of excellence plan would then define the time frame and detailed objectives for achieving enterprise-wide excellence (see Figure 2).
Figure 2: CMM Excellence Timetable
The Pillars of Success
In order to clearly understand what deficiencies need to be addressed, we need to appreciate the value that excellence brings to each pillar.
Knowledgeable and Well-Trained People
Knowledgeable people have by far the greatest impact on total cost and degree of success because they also have a cumulative effect on the other three pillars. While there are no exact calculations to draw on, people who are not knowledgeable in BI – either IT, clients or both – can easily add 10 to 50 percent to the total cost of a BI application. In a worst-case scenario, inadequate knowledge can add several hundred percent to the total cost of a delivered application. This happens when a seriously flawed development continues to try to produce results, taking the entire team two to five times longer than what should have been required.
Proven Processes
As in most endeavors, having proven processes to guide work into the most efficient and high-quality paths has clear cost advantages. The building of data warehouses and BI applications needs the discipline such a process provides. The problem may be that the enterprise does not understand that there are significant differences in the steps necessary to design and build a BI application than those required to design and build a transaction or reporting system.
Lacking well-defined and proven "iterative" processes to build and maintain large complex BI applications can be costly. In larger enterprises, weakness in this pillar can add 5 to 20 percent to the overall cost of a project. In the worst case, it can also lead to a project's failure to ever obtain the required results.
Technology That Works
Providing technology that works is not as simple as one might think. This pillar stands on the client's definition of what works and what doesn't, and is often the most difficult to assess for weaknesses. Typical weaknesses here include performance, usability and integration issues. These weaknesses add cost in either correction or lack of functionality. In general, technology woes can add 5 to 25 percent to the total cost. Again, the worst case is that expected benefits are not derived because the technology issues don't get resolved.
Clean Data
Having clean usable data throughout enterprise warehouses is like having a well-organized, accessible and dirt-free garage. Even if you get it cleaned and organized once, it quickly returns to a degree of chaos if not continuously managed. Measuring the effect of unclean or unusable information can be quite difficult, except in rare instances of obvious disconnects. More often, the cost of inconsistent or unreliable information is measured in wasted time using it, an inability to derive value and future requests for new applications with better data.
Weakness in this pillar can also be expensive. For newly launched applications, serious weakness can cause significant rework in the data architecture and ETL components, costing from 5 to 15 percent of the total spent to get it launched the first time. Additional costs will be incurred if data becomes less reliable over time, and these costs will continue to rise until the issues are resolved.
Business Intelligence Excellence
By breaking down the four pillars of success in business intelligence into their critical success factors, we can begin to define principles for excellence that guide the enterprise, as well as identify more concrete CoE objectives.
Value Knowledgeable and Well-Trained People
Building and retaining knowledgeable BI and DW resources needs to become a priority within IT, particularly at the senior-architect level. These architects will need to face off with senior customers and external solution providers, which is not an easy task in any discipline.
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