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What Organizations Should Consider When Moving Toward BI for the Masses

BI Analyst

The article “BI Analyst Take: BI for the Masses - Is It Becoming a Reality?,” published two months ago, stated that the mere expansion of business intelligence (BI) tools across the organization does not meet the definition of “BI for the masses.” To achieve true BI for the masses, organizations must provide relevant information to each decision maker across the organization. In many cases, the information is available and data marts have been developed to help answer questions about business problems, but no overlap exists to tie this information together. Therefore, before organizations embark on a full-scale approach to BI for the masses, they should consider their current environment, their IT infrastructure and the information required to tie BI applications across business units. This list is by no means exhaustive, but it offers organizations an overview of initial factors to consider when expanding their BI towards actual BI for the masses.

 

BI Maturity

 

The longer BI has been implemented within an organization, the more likely it will expand beyond its initial purpose. For instance, organizations that develop OLAP cubes to analyze sales trends may expand towards operational BI by placing BI within business processes – such as to enable manufacturers to identify parts’ defects or to manage the performance of their staff. The key, in terms of successful BI for the masses, is to tie each initiative to one other. This is accomplished by identifying overlaps that exist due to data capture, business process or collaboration required.

 

The development of BI solutions should always be tied to answering or addressing business issues. For instance, how can sales be increased in various geographic areas? Even though not all departments will be involved in the initial phases of BI expansion, the inclusion of business units early on in the process helps ensure future buy-in and enables organizations to get a 360 degree view of required information sources required. Through this early involvement of key stakeholders, future uses of BI will be identified, enabling IT to take into account future and current information requirements and how they overlap.

 

IT Infrastructure

 

Generally, organizations with a mature BI solution have strong IT infrastructures. Within BI, organizations should consider the current data warehousing environment to identify data volumes and the future increase in number of data sources. In many cases, when organizations first implement BI, they do not consider future requirements as they are looking to fulfill immediate business requirements. The implications of short-sighted planning may include having a data warehouse that does not perform well or that does not meet internal service level agreements (SLAs) due to an inability to support large data requirements. Organizations should consider future growth when implementing initial solutions to ensure proper space requirements and design that takes into account growth and changes over time.

 

Organization-Wide Data Capture

 

To bring BI to decision-makers across the organization and to make sure the right information is delivered to the right people, organizations should identify what information is valuable to decision-makers, which includes where it resides, how it is linked and who is responsible. The information required to create true BI for the masses includes capturing data across the organization that is required for both departmental and organization-wide business functions. Although it is important to build a BI solution incrementally to help solve various business issues, the only way to achieve true BI for the masses is to tie these initiatives to an overall long-term goal. This involves looking at each initiative as a piece of a larger puzzle that once completed will enable any decision-maker within the organization to analyze the information they require to make informed decisions.

 

In addition to the identification of how data interrelates, the collaboration between business units and the collaboration between business and IT becomes important to bridge the gap between disparate systems and to develop a roadmap that ties the organization’s data to overall business processes. If disparate departments do not collaborate on projects, there could be issues with sharing information and granting information access to other decision-makers from different business units within the organization. Assuming this is not the case, organizations still require the appropriate information to identify the factors that will lead them to a successful initiative.

 

BI for the masses is a natural extension of a mature BI environment. When organizations move towards the expansion of BI, they should consider the current maturity of BI within their organization, the IT infrastructure and the information required across the organization and how it interrelates. Although there are many other factors that contribute to the success of BI for the masses, the three factors discussed in this article provide a framework for the initial steps towards achieving a successful infrastructure to add value to the current BI infrastructure.


Lyndsay Wise is an industry analyst for business intelligence. For more than seven years, she has assisted clients in business systems analysis, software selection and implementation of enterprise applications. Wise also conducts research of leading technologies, products and vendors in business intelligence, marketing performance management, master data management, and unstructured data. Check out her blog at myblog.wiseanalytics.com.

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