Integrating BI with Business Architecture: A Process for Success
Information Management Magazine, December 2005
Today, leaders of business intelligence (BI) initiatives face challenges that are less about the development of the technologies and more about adaptation - specifically, adapting to the insights they derive from their endeavors with BI. Thus, despite its promise, BI is not consistently delivering the return on investment that C-level executives have expected. Some companies, after spending millions of dollars, have yanked the plug on their BI projects. Remorse is common.
BI projects were initially sold for solid business reasons, as a means of delivering deeper performance insights, transforming and streamlining dysfunctional operations and reducing general risks. What has gone wrong? Some blame the lackluster results on the number, mix and integration of technologies - but technology alone is rarely the root cause of the problems. The cause is more systemic: BI can force uncomfortable and often rapid changes on an organization, and not all companies can absorb and operationalize those changes effectively. Poorly run BI initiatives can actually create more problems than they were intended to solve.
With BI, everything converges upon data. Consider the types of changes BI creates: new database schemas, renamed database columns, new report requirements, systems retirement, new data marts, merger or acquisition and extract, transform and load (ETL) processes are replatformed from one technology to another. These kinds of changes often occur concurrently, and all of them affect business operations and their supporting data. This intense focus on data means that BI programs should proactively facilitate data integration caused by change they initiate. With governance, BI programs can reduce data redundancy, minimize systemic risks and promote new business functionality, data integrity and data reuse. Without control, organizations can quickly and easily perpetuate data anomalies across business processes. Those anomalies can expose a company to unnecessary risk and unanticipated levels of spending.
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The Approach
How can companies effectively manage change caused by BI? And, more importantly, how can companies increase the chance of the business successfully adopting the results of each initiative? The approach described recognizes data as the common point of convergence for managing changes to a business architecture. The approach emphasizes 10 activities that should be used as a checklist by those accountable for BI success to corroborate the effectiveness of existing processes (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: Approach to Change Management and Governance
1. Acknowledge. Any need to change business operations or performance reporting should first be acknowledged. A formal request should include the business purpose, business and technical impact of the change, sponsor, stakeholders, time frames, resources, budget, value and specific measures by which the organization will know whether or not the change has been successfully implemented and adopted by the business.
Facilitating change assessment should not be underestimated. Again, change comes in different forms, such as adding characteristics to product, altering the customer hierarchy or adding a metric to a fact table. Upstream changes in transaction systems can also impact downstream BI capabilities, such as adding a new B2B channel partner, changing a table-driven pricing engine to accommodate new parameters or adding new modules to an ERP package. These types of changes often alter underlying data models or data definitions.
2. Assess. Upon acknowledgement, business and technical architects should qualify each change to identify: a) the true benefits of the change, such as improved competitive strength, workforce productivity, market growth, asset utilization or operational insight; b) the impact of the change on the business and IT; c) whether or not the adoption criteria are measurable and achievable; and d) the risk with respect to financial, regulatory, investor, tax and operational customer reporting. The assessment must separate "wants" (optional or nonoptimal) from "needs" (changes critical to business operations.)
All change proposals, regardless of budgetary impact, should go through this initial gate review. What happens when companies establish monetary request thresholds? Lesser budgets are often automatically approved. The unintended consequence: lots of disconnected projects. These activities can quickly spread like viruses across an organization, taking on a life of their own and absorbing more than their fair share of critical resources. Over time, left unchecked, unauthorized and undocumented changes to business processes, systems and data increase a company's exposure to risk. Organizations that successfully conduct change assessments can ensure that the weight of nonintegrated change requests does not take mission-critical initiatives under.
3. Approach. After assessing the business benefits and change-related impacts, architects may accept the request and prioritize and sequence the actions or work necessary to implement the request. Alternatively, they may provide reasons to deny or postpone the change. This second gate review includes a detailed review of the triple constraint: costs, resources and time frames, and possibly the identification of a project manager to begin outlining a charter, high-level project plan, major milestones and interdependencies with other approved investments currently underway.
4. Authorize. A joint business and technical steering committee conducts the third and final gate review. This body is responsible for reviewing the change proposal and its adoption success criteria. The committee either authorizes (funds) the operationalization of the change or denies the need for the change. Ideally, officers from across the organization will comprise this body because of their accountability for the viability of the company's operations. Some organizations refer to this body collectively as data stewards. Formal authorization establishes a consistent method of ranking, comparing and selecting investments whose impact on the business can be measured over time. This should foster innovative, responsive investment methods, calculated risk taking to allow a corporation to fund cross-business unit priorities and corporate-wide initiatives to respond quickly to new business needs independent of any budgeting cycle. It also should improve the alignment of resources to those investments.
5. Assign. For approved proposals, the steering committee officers jointly assign accountability to the right sponsor from within their group to operationalize the proposed changes. At this point, the committee funds the project and sets expectations about outcomes that should result.
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