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Planning the BI-C: Level One - Project

The Information Domain

This is the fifth in this series of planning a business intelligence-collaboration project. Access the previous installments:
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

This month we will complete our mini-series on the process to plan a business intelligence collaboration (BI-C) environment via a methodology to perform a readiness assessment.

We have covered the People, Process and Technology domains, and this month we'll conclude by addressing the Information domain by continuing with the same example, at the project level: a DW/BI application that addresses a specific, internal business need based on the measuring, monitoring and controlling a process.

Figure 1: Four Domains of Business Intelligence Collaboration

The Information domain is contains "what" is shared. Information is the fuel that makes a BI-C program run; and over time it can become a highly valuable asset to an organization. Years ago when performing an assessment of a automotive manufacturer's data warehouse environment, it became very clear to all of us involved in the project that the problems plaguing the organization in getting projects completed on time, budget and meeting the business goals had nothing to do with the selected DW/BI technologies, methods and project staff, but it had everything to do with leveraging their investment in these areas across organizational boundaries. They had vast repositories of information in the building, planning and implementing a DW/BI program that the company had invested millions in that were available to a new project planning and development team if they only knew it existed.

This organization had (at last count) more than 120 significant BI applications in production and many more in the planning and development stages during our assessment. Yet, the sharing and leveraging of methods, designs, plans, experience ... only occurred at an individual, one-off level or via companywide e-mail asking if anyone had done something similar. This infrequently was successful, and we discovered during our assessment that often large sources of information, which could have been very valuable to a project, went undiscovered and unused. There was simply no formal process or automated toolset to assist the management, planning and development teams to direct the DW/BI development program with a consistent methodology and store the Information assets of the project for future use.

The last sentence above contains a critical success factor in developing a successful BI-C - the capability to automatically capture and store project Information derived from the use of a consistent methodology. If everyone in the organization is collecting and documenting requirements, models, designs, release plans ... in differing ways, in different repositories, with differing attributes and deliverable templates, it makes the process of sharing Information cumbersome; and you'll find yourself reinventing the wheel over and over again. A common complaint among project teams is that routine project processes consume so much time they take away from the project team's ability to lend focused, critical thought to the important tasks during a DW/BI project.

In this article, we hope to help the reader asks the right questions around the Information domain to ensure they can build a true automated, collaborative business intelligence environment.

Domain - Information