Developing a business intelligence roadmap

'Business intelligence roadmap' - a term widely used but often not fully understood. The purpose of the business intelligence (BI) roadmap is to deliver incremental improvements and enhancements to all areas of BI. A well thought through roadmap will improve support for existing reporting solutions as well as manage expectations and plans to address new requirements.

And where to start? Well, with “A” of course!

A key first step is to understand the current state of analytics in the area being assessed. Analytic solutions include dashboards, scorecards, reports and ad hoc querying, and can be mapped using a simple matrix:

Once the “as is” situation has been established, planning can begin. BI teams should provide a range of analytic capabilities to business, focusing on new analytic capabilities when recommending new solutions. So if, for example, an area already has multiple standard reports but no dashboards, then recommended solutions for the area should be centred on dashboard design and development.

Going hand-in-hand with analytics is the establishment of a data roadmap. As tools such as dashboards and reports are deployed, it becomes important to understand what data elements are available in which tools.

Data elements include customer, product, segmentation, etc. As the business strategy changes, customer or product segmentation can change, resulting in a need to include that data in the data warehouse and subsequent reporting solutions.

This can be taken a step forward by categorising data into the following: new data in the existing mart; new mart; new data from an existing source; new data from a new source; and data not available currently.

This forms the platform for planning going forward, and is the “homework” so often overlooked when making decisions relating to your most important asset: your information. It also allows for re-use of existing processes, systems and information, investment and historical data, which is so often compromised with BI system implementations. And it aligns perfectly with the ASG approach, helping you to identify and prioritise your BI needs.

The development of a BI roadmap, together with an understanding of the relationship between business processes and data generation and integrity, underpins all BI initiatives.

Adapted from Hiren Deliwala's article: “Developing a Business Intelligence Roadmap”, recently published in information-management.com. Deliwala has more than 10 years' experience in the BI and data warehousing space.