Enabling decision support

It has never been more critical for business leaders to make the right decision first time. In the current complex and competitive business environment, the cost of making poor decisions is high and potentially fatal for an organisation. Executives have a deeper appreciation for the importance of having access to correct, timely information to help guide the decision-making process, and they understand the need to engage with their IT teams in order to gain access to both internal and external data.

For those focused on empowering business leaders with the technology and data to assist effective decision-making, the planning and implementation of a business intelligence (BI) roadmap and strategy is critical.

Companies should plan and build enterprise-wide BI architecture and infrastructure - both technical and non-technical - in order to create a decision support environment that is truly cross-organisational and delivers trusted information.

Enterprise-wide architecture and infrastructure cannot be considered merely as bridging old systems across different platforms, but rather as competencies, ensuring true information integration and integrity, seamless business functionality and streamlined processes.

Deriving business value from BI requires synergy between people, process and technology. Such a complex business environment is best defined and managed by means of a BI architecture framework, whereby all these different components can clearly be specified and integrated.

An effective BI strategy is dependent on the quality of decision architecture. It is the foundation and is core to successful strategy roll-out.

By understanding the strategic objectives of the business and its goals, one is able to understand the type of information that users need in order to achieve.

Further to this, understanding the user's requirements and technical literacy levels will ensure the ability to provide a solution that adds significant value to business.

There are a number of steps that have to be taken to develop a BI roadmap and set implementation governance.

The first step is to define information requirements by focusing attention on the critical outcomes of the BI strategy. Companies that do not have a defined corporate performance management (CPM) framework will first need to engage top executives to define the CPM; define key performance indicators (KPIs), linked to key performance areas and strategic objectives.

Companies that have defined their CPM goals will still need to design and document the visualisation of business drivers and KPIs. These companies will then need to take both a short-term (tactical) and long-term (strategic) view of how to achieve their goals.

The next step is to assess current infrastructure and then identify short-term fixes to improve performance and long-term architectural enhancements to aid scalability, adoption and security concerns.

Next on the list is to identify and document how to best leverage current data sources, then develop and administer a standardised, logical communication layer. It is important to take on a methodology that will be used to continuously improve BI implementation and adoption.

Deriving business value from BI requires synergy between people, process and technology.

Once this is in place, the next step is to detail best practice BI project methodology and deploy secure organisation-wide access to information.

Then it is left to identify skills, data and information gaps that might limit strategic achievement, and then align BI implementation to the company's overall strategy.

These are guidelines and suggested steps to introduce and successfully implement BI in the company.

The most critical success factor for establishing successful BI and data warehousing is driven by key decision-makers and executives taking responsibility for defining information requirements.

A core attribute of companies that excel and make significant gains from the implementation of these technology projects is a company that values information and executives that use information to drive performance. They understand the value of the insight provided and they have supportive IT departments that help them to achieve their goals.

These essential differentiators can account for more than half of the success of the project, as the company sees the information provided from BI as a competitive advantage in their business.

Certain companies have the ability to make these decisions and complete this analysis themselves internally; others look for partners that have the capability to provide them with an honest product review that is impartial to a particular vendor. However a company chooses to assess its business needs, a key requirement when making project decisions should be to enable people to make better decisions, faster.

Be on the lookout for my next Industry Insight focused on establishing trust. Don't let the data let you down!