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« BI on BI? Big Iron Still Delivers Data Punch | Main | Top 10 BI Trends to Watch - 2008 » December 11, 2007Best Practices for Turning Useless Data into Actionable Information
ebizQ colleague James Taylor points to a new report out of Forrester (available to ebizQ members for premium download here) that discusses Business Intelligence strategies organizations need to follow in the years ahead. In the report, Forrester analyst Boris Evelson not only provides guidance on BI strategy, but also examines the meaning behind BI. James quotes Evelson's definition of BI: "A set of processes and technologies that transform raw, meaningless data into useful and actionable information." BI has certainly had its issues, as Evelson explains. "Even after decades of BI usage, most organizations find best BI doesn't sound like much fun, does it? To smooth things a bit, or at least relieve such angst, Evelson compiled a list of best practices in which to get BI started or kick-started within organizations, some of which are highlighted below. His advice overall: "Don't treat BI strategies as a project -- treat BI as a journey." Pick a senior executive sponsor who understands that measurement is management: "Look for an executive who has the entire picture of the enterprise objectives, goals, and strategies, and who has the know-how to link and translate them into the key performance indicators (KPIs) necessary to support these objectives." Put data governance and data stewardship in place: No effort will succeed without common data definitions across all business units. And, as noted above, measurement is vital, Evelson says. "Start small and pick the KPIs that are essential to operate the business. Pick only 10 to 20 KPIs and build the initial standards and governance with them in mind. Come up with standardized definitions of quality, sources of truth for the data, and business rules to calculate these KPIs/KPMs (key performance measures)." Conduct a "current state analysis:" Make sure that this analysis "includes all components of the BI stack and all of the processes and organizational structures surrounding your existing BI implementations. Both business and IT stakeholders have to be involved in this initiative." Define a logical and physical data architecture: Decide whether you will be deploying data marts, a data warehouse, or "semantic layers" (or EII, enterprise information integration architecture) that accesses operational data sources. Know they user: This sounds simple enough, but most organizations have a wide variety of user types that will have different expectations of the BI system. Evelson points out that there are typically three broad classes of users: strategic, tactical, and operational. For example, strategic users make very few decisions, but the decisions these users make have profound consequences for the business." These users "favor aggregated data that extends across business domains — they ask the big questions and need the big picture to do so, too." Operational users, on the other hand, "work on the frontlines — for example, the hundreds or perhaps thousands of representatives in call centers. These users don’t need cross-domain data, just data within their own set of applications. They don’t need the big picture, just a very granular view of many small pictures." Evelson also adds that most BI applications and data will require at least five terabytes' worth of storage space over the next five years. Lastly, addressing the biggest stick in many BI pundits' craws, Evelson advises not trying to fight BI-by-spreadsheet. "Excel’s local control, flexibility, and complexity are perfect matches for data-intensive analysts who like to run every scenario with constantly changing data. No BI tool is going to replace Excel entirely; the trick is a coexistence strategy between IT and the business." Or, as my colleague Michael Dortch (of RFG) so aptly put it a few months back: "Spreadsheets: can't work with 'em; can't work without 'em!" Posted by joemckendrick in Business Intelligence | Digg This | Add to del.icio.us Trackback Pings TrackBack URL for this entry: |
