Proven Practice for a BI Strategy

This is a closer look at the tips suggested in “How to Build a Successful BI Strategy.”

Complete assessment of processes, technology and people in the current state has to be done as these will be critical to the success of any changes made to the current environment. You should discuss and document the current information systems, technology, processes and governance procedures being used. You should detail how your organization is currently utilizing BI, which should include a complete inventory of all platforms, technologies and tools being used to develop and deliver BI content. Current-state analysis should include current users, user profiles and how those people have been using information. It should document current processes and structures for managing information. All of this put together will help you determine the viability of the options based on overall enterprise objectives.

As part of current-state analysis, gauge your current state of BI capabilities and should determine how various technologies and governance procedures are being implemented.

You can focus on how people are using the BI solutions after analyzing how BI capabilities are being leveraged. You can visualize if users are currently receiving information in a format that allows them to make the best use of BI resources. It also helps to determine how the users are consuming information. Another important aspect to look at is the existing governance procedures and processes for data management to ensure proper definition and quality of the data. These are all important factors to keep in mind when you are gathering and documenting your current state information.

Current-state analysis helps you in highlighting the pain points, which makes it easier to address them. You should plan to do an analysis of the current BI maturity state. By documenting the current BI maturity model, you enhance your ability to identify the problem areas, which helps you in coming up with solution definitions. It is also useful to determine the BI readiness of the enterprise. It is easy to fill in the gaps once you define the issues that need to be addressed and you have a clear vision of the overall objectives and the direction to get to the future state.

After current-state analysis, you understand the BI environment that you have. Now, you must decide what you want your future environment to be in order to achieve the BI vision. In the current-state analysis you identified how stakeholders are currently accessing and using information. Now you have to determine the best approach for users to access and consume information. 

You should define how users will share information and knowledge in the target state and the kind of collaborative environment that will be made available to them for the best utilization of BI solutions. Use of multiple technologies and techniques could be needed to come up with the desired method of delivery and the best fit. Identifying business processes and key stakeholders is a must for this effort, as these will be critical to obtain funding and to progress the project forward.

As part of the analysis, review BI plans to confirm whether you are moving in the right direction. You should also assess the organizational readiness to fully leverage BI. Following the evaluation, you can begin to create a long-term program through recommended next steps for detailed planning and design. The target state should reflect the vision to combine BI with the areas of business process management, performance improvement, customer service, knowledge management, cross-functional information exchange, etc. Building on the BI-driven initiatives provides opportunities for performance improvement and better business process management.

Assessment of imminent requirements and long-term business needs enable you to break down BI strategy work into multiple projects classified into phases. You must prioritize the objectives for efficient use of available BI resources. Prioritization of BI objectives also provides you and business with a better understanding of how the BI environment will take shape as you progress. Projects should be evaluated for their overall contribution to the BI strategy by determining how a particular project helps you get a step closer to the BI strategic vision. For example, a project to build a performance measurement system for financials would align with the business strategy of effective utilization of funds. As you progress through the phases, you can see the focus of projects transitioning from addressing the current requirements to the imminent and future needs.

According to Ventana Research, the biggest development challenges to BI are data-related issues such as assuring data quality, supporting highly complex conceptual data models and supporting access to intraday real-time data. Current and future-state analysis should help you with building a transformation plan to bridge the gap between the current and future state. 

• A transformation plan establishes the guidelines necessary for building the proposed BI structures and related technologies. 
• The sequence of implementation of core processes and data structures are laid out in this section. The transformation plan can start with a high-level perspective, with detail being added to the plan as you progress. 
• The plan should include actionable steps i.e., it should define a set of projects to be undertaken, establish governance and processes, set the conceptual, logical and physical architecture, establish the infrastructure outline, develop information delivery projects and incorporate information needs. When designing the transformation roadmap, you should take into account information needs of users, including how users want to receive and consume the information. 
• In the transformation plan, you can formalize how you plan to identify and prioritize BI iterations.
• The plan should account for capacity, performance, data quality, data security, metadata control and data retention policies. You should also consider the BI implementation time frame, prioritization of individual BI projects and resource availability for BI-centric projects. Broad policy outlines in a transformation roadmap will help you when you get to the details. As an example, high-level decisions made on data retention will impact data architecture such as partitioning of the data as well as technical architecture such as disk storage.

In the transformation plan you must outline high-level process issues such as refresh rates, capacity plan, backup, recovery, archive, workflow and security. Again, you should address as many of these topics as possible, even though no particular iteration of BI initiatives is being discussed. A component of the overall roadmap that is often overlooked is how iterations will be tested before rollout. Topics should include criteria for enterprise adherence and approval, criteria and plan for test data selection, capacity planning, scalability of the BI solutions, high-level testing plans and overview of unit, integration, performance and user testing.