Technology alone is not enough when it comes to getting true value out of BI

Business intelligence (BI) implementations must be sustainable if they are to deliver true business value - and to be sustainable, they must address change management issues.

"Companies must ensure that organisational change management activities are part of their early BI project deployment plans," says Bruce Bond-Myatt, consulting manager: Financial Services, of SAS Institute, leaders in business intelligence.

"If this is ignored, the technical implementation may be good, but no benefits will accrue to the business."

The focus of any BI project must be on sustainable information delivery.

"In the past, much investment went into the building of the data warehouse, and very little into actually using it, which is where the value comes in," says Bond-Myatt.

Typically, every part of the business identifies the need for data that is accurate, timeous and consistently interpreted to support day-to-day business requirements. Typically too, the organisation has spent large sums of money on a Data Warehouse and its technology infrastructure.

"Technology on its own, however, is not enough," says Bond-Myatt. "Enterprises require the correct organisational structure to manage and leverage the BI processes and technology."

He recommends that the BI department be enterprise-wide, with representation into the highest executive level. Independent research organisation, Gartner, proposes the creation of a BI competency centre, which brings together business, analytical and IT skills, and incorporates development and maintenance, production support, BI delivery and data governance.

The advantages of a well-designed BI approach are many and include the opportunity of building a business intelligence competence and level of maturity across the enterprise, including business, IT and analytic skills. It also ensures that the organisation builds an enterprise capacity to effectively leverage information as a competitive advantage. The organisation also gains the ability to leverage off scarce resources to develop and implement best practice BI processes from a centralised point.

A proper resourcing model also reduces dependency on key individuals and creates new career options. In addition it improves understanding of the interdependencies between source systems and the information delivery system.

Finally, it ensures the development and implementation of standardised best of breed BI processes across the enterprise

Trek to the summit

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The macro steps for achieving a proper resourcing model are:

* Decide on the final organisational structure and get sign-off from executive management. (HR must be involved)

* Define requirements for each role

* Prepare key responsibilities for each role

* Grade each role

* Create a organisational budget for the job positions to be created

* Decide how to fill the roles, and put an acquisition or migration plan in place

* Ensure that the upper management roles are assigned since you will need management support for implementing any changes to organisation

* Start early in the project.

Once the organisation structure has been defined and agreed, and staffed with appropriate resources, remember that it is important to build a culture of delivering value to the business. Specifically there must be strong interaction between the BI department and the end users, to allow for education, advocacy and use of information as well as feedback on what is required from an informational aspect.