For the third year in a row, business intelligence (BI) applications have been ranked the top technology priority in the 2008 Gartner Executive Programs survey of 1,500 chief information officers (CIOs).1 Another recent report by Gartner indicates that businesses aren't effectively implementing a BI strategy, which could limit achievement of business goals.2 Have you executed a BI strategy, and the BI strategy you arrived at has landed in organizational closet. Are you trying to find an answer on what went wrong and what could have done better to make the BI strategy acceptable across the organization?
Creating a BI strategy that is easily acceptable to different units within your organization takes much more than just sound BI knowledge. You need the right approach, techniques and few smart moves to make your strategy actionable and attractive enough to remain outside the organizational closet. Before we understand how to make the BI strategy acceptable in the organization, let us define BI strategy. A BI strategy is a long-term plan for an enterprise-wide BI architecture that is designed to make the organization agile, adaptable and efficient by enabling better decision-making. A sound BI strategy would help the organization to leverage information assets effectively for achieving competitive edge in the market.
BI strategy is different from taking immediate actions with the resources at hand and is usually developed over a period of 3 years or more. The BI strategy should guide and lead organizational thinking and behavior to use information as strategic assets. BI strategy should have a comprehensive approach and method for describing the current and dynamic future behavior of an organization's processes, information systems, personnel and organizational units, so that they align with the organization's goals and strategic direction. Effective BI strategy should ensure that business strategy and IT investments are aligned. We will now provide the right approach for creating a successful BI strategy that would gel well in the overall enterprise framework and at the same time be politically acceptable within the organization. We will also see the important tricks you should deploy at different stages to make your BI strategy sociable and work toward achieving your organizational goals in nine steps.
The First Step: Get Stakeholders Onboard
Identifying the executive-level sponsorship and key stakeholders who are committed to make organization information centric is the first step toward a successful BI strategy. If there are several groups that would benefit from the BI strategy, the group that is most influential in the organization should drive the BI strategy. A clear, actionable and achievable objective of the strategy should be defined. This objective should be endorsed by all the stakeholders. The scope of the BI strategy should be drawn within the boundaries of the objective. The functional boundaries of the BI strategy should also be laid down.
The next most critical thing is the name to be given to the BI strategy. The name given to the BI strategy should clearly reflect the business objective of the BI strategy. This makes it easy to set expectations for the outcome of the BI strategy. A detailed project plan should be created outlining activities, resources, milestones and expected deliverables. A meeting planner should be published in advance to ensure time commitments from key subject matter experts and stakeholders. Once the initial foundation is set for the strategy, it is important to inaugurate the BI strategy with an official kick-off meeting. This should include participation from all the key associates within the organization who would play crucial roles in executing the BI strategy. Their participation would also show that you consider them an important part of this strategy, and they would hopefully feel an obligation to make the BI strategy a success.
The Second Step: Understand As-Is Business and IT Landscape
We are now all set for BI strategy execution with the correct launch pad, plan and ammunitions. Understanding current business processes, data and the associated IT environment is a good starting point for taking the strategy forward. A good understanding of the business functions and processes should be gathered by meeting the business team. The BI strategy team should be well prepared with a questionnaire and agenda before the meeting.
There could be two possible scenarios while doing the BI strategy, one in which the organization does not have a defined BI environment and another where the BI environment exist but is not aligned with business objectives. If there is no existing BI environment, the first logical step is to conduct a BI maturity assessment prior to embarking on the BI journey. Start by assessing the BI maturity that exists in the organization with industry standards. Define the business objectives, information needs and data available to understand what would be feasible within the BI strategy scope. In case we already have a BI environment within the organization, we should start with the as-is analysis of business processes, associated data and intelligent decision-making by carrying out source systems analysis and analysis of various BI components, such as the data integration layer, staging areas, operational data store, data warehouse, data marts and the reporting environment. The existing system should be analyzed by direct access to quality assurance or pre-production environment. Output of as-is analysis should be well documented with pictorial representation of existing functional and information management architecture. A pictorial view of both existing functional and existing information management architecture would help in discussions and brainstorming throughout the BI strategy.
