Business intelligence (BI) is geared to providing management with the information they need to make business decisions that drive the organisation forward. It enables decision-makers to manage by exception, stay informed with alerts, and drill into data to examine the root cause of business conditions.
"While BI implementation projects continue to show consistently high return on investment (ROI) and are increasingly recognised for business success, few organisations have a comprehensive enterprise strategy or clearly defined BI standards," says George Smalberger, sales and marketing director at Ovations, provider of business process management, enterprise content management, enterprise application integration and BI solutions.
"Additionally, many companies are currently facing the consequences of a growing patchwork of disparate BI technologies and wasteful duplication across different BI products. These include rising redundant costs in deployment, maintenance and training, increased information inconsistencies and frustrated end-users who cannot get timely answers to business questions. This situation is becoming increasingly complicated as new, uncoordinated BI projects sprout up across the enterprise."
Smalberger says reducing the number of standard BI tools enables organisations to streamline costs and obtain a greater return on their information assets. "They have more control over their information and are better aligned with business users. Most importantly, they increase their competitive advantage because the organisation is getting the most out of enterprise BI."
Smalberger points out, however, that BI standardisation is about more than technical implementations and warns against treating BI standardisation as an IT project. "Many organisations approach their BI projects on a layer-by-layer basis, beginning with the operational applications and working their way up.
"BI standardisation is primarily a strategic initiative through which the organisation drives the effectiveness of decision-making and competitive strategy. Just as much work should be spent on organisational readiness, the internal politics of information flows, and data authorisations as on metadata and data movement."
Several factors determine an organisation`s "BI maturity", says Smalberger, and should be carefully reviewed and the appropriate steps taken before launching a standardisation project. "The organisation`s track record of successful departmental BI implications is significant, as well as its history of other successful standardisation efforts. Secondly, a minimum level of trust and respect must exist between the IT department and other divisions in the organisation, and a culture of information sharing rather than hoarding must prevail.
"Many organisations tend to underestimate the need for business abilities in BI projects," Smalberger continues. "A frequent mistake is to appoint a business-savvy IT person as the project leader, rather than a technology-minded businessperson. While the leaders of the BI projects do not need detailed knowledge of technology issues, they do need the political and business skills to work around the issues inevitably raised by strategic, cross-functional initiatives."
A long-term BI strategy is also essential, he adds, not only for ensuring that the full benefits of BI are received, but also to avoid the slow degeneration of the chosen standards. "BI stands at the intersection of business and IT. Often these teams have a history of mistrust that can prevent the successful implementation of any new BI strategy. By implementing a formal BI methodology the promised benefits that BI projects bring are ensured. The methodology should detail the roles of different groups, such as IT, business users and technical support, and should cover both the technical and user-oriented phases of the project.
Smalberger also recommends the creation of a BI competency centre (BICC), responsible for overseeing BI implementations and ensuring that BI best practices are developed and shared throughout the organisation. "The BICC supports users and maintains the consistency of BI projects. Ideally, a businessperson should head the BICC, which should report to the core business departments in a collaborative environment with IT and the other departments. The team`s tasks include consulting and development, support, negotiations and licence management.
"A BICC that has been staffed with technical people will almost inevitably default to the comfortable role of technical support, to the detriment of the overall value it provides. Consequently, the centre should gradually build up a complete BI knowledge base, so that it becomes skilled at detecting the most common problems, and can thus respond promptly by taking corrective action in the form of further training or calling on the BI vendors."
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