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Eight Essential Mantras for BI Outsourcing Success

BI Outsourcing

  • Radha R
  • DM Review Online, October 11, 2007

DM Review welcomes Radha R as our newest online columnist. She will address best practices in outsourcing business intlligence applications for overall profitabililty and customer satisfaction.

"It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change ..." said Charles Darwin. No other single statement is more applicable to business intelligence (BI) initiatives than this.

Any BI initiative is a multiyear, multifunction business-oriented implementation with changing business scenarios and associated complications and nuances. When we add on the dimension of outsourcing, the nuances and complications need more thought and deeper attention. These eight key mantras hold the key to successful BI outsourcing.

Develop the Right Mind-Set

Most people often think that "BI projects are different from other IT projects" and hence feel that BI projects cannot be outsourced. Get out of this mind-set first. The common rules and mantras of outsourcing apply to BI initiatives too.

A strong executive commitment and a shared vision is the key to success. Maintaining all the core thinking and critical work on site and outsourcing or offshoring the no-brainers in a factory setting mode to a partner will just lead to failure. Transparency of the vision and shared milestones and end goals is critical, along with special attention to the nuances.

One can begin outsourcing if you are sure that quality at lower cost can be made a reality. Throw out the myopic view that "unimportant" work gets outsourced.

Choose the Right Partner

Once you are committed to outsource, the most important step is to choose the right partner. The service provider must be the one who shares your vision and need for success.

The partner must have an excellent understanding of the industry, key metrics for that industry and know the kind of decisions that the end users are likely to make based on the BI application. The service provider must have an appreciation of the practical difficulties involved in putting together a usable and successful BI application. The depth of understanding should go beyond just the tool usage. A high level of understanding and knowledge of information standards and possessing an approach to master data management is crucial for the partner selection. In today's scenario, it is important to choose a partner with knowledge and good practices in other converging technologies such as enterprise application integration (EAI), service-oriented architecture (SOA), etc.

Designing and delivering a nimble architecture is critical to BI success, so choose a partner who appreciates the fact that business environments change. Do not go with a "tool pusher" who fits a "tool" to the scenario rather than appreciating the scenario and exploiting the tool to the fullest and works around the limitations. Knowledge and experience of implementing end to end data warehousing and BI projects is a necessity. Choosing a partner who can only do a piece of the tool work normally ends up as a recipe for failure as they do not appreciate the big picture or own the shared vision.

Take a Portfolio Management Approach

Long-term success from outsourcing stems from a well-thought-out roadmap. BI implementations are multiyear projects, and the successful ones are not the big bang projects, but those that are brought out in phases and implemented by subject area. Not all phases of the BI application are offshorable. BI applications which are just in the process of getting rolled out to business users may not be outsourced immediately because of change management sensitivities and data quality issues, which cannot be resolved by a partner who is brought in just at that stage.

A portfolio management approach to outsourcing must include the following questions:

  • What is the spread of BI applications, their technical complexity and business criticality?
  • If BI applications are in support phase, what is the mix of support activity across extract, transform and load (ETL), data quality, database operations and reports by application?
  • What is the guidance criteria used to offshore BI activities?

Map your current portfolio into an easily recognizable visual by prominence of activities shown in Figure 1. This will give a flavor of what is ahead and who to choose.


Figure 1

Big Bang Will not Work

Identifying clear milestones is critical for BI success, which is why one should never plan a big bang. Have multiple mini projects clearly defined. Have stretch goals for yourselves as well as for your partners.

Figure 2

Execute projects under two broad phases - planning and execution. The planning phase is the time to understand the business requirements, get business and end-user buy-in and make the right business case for the budget. This is typically done with the right partner organization. It is ideal to involve the partner in this phase, then they truly share the vision and can take up the execution.

Once business interest is captured and first signs of success with business users are seen, the partner and your internal team share the energy and drive to make the whole program a great win.

There must also be clear business ownership for the master data, for maintaining conformed dimensions and measuring definitions. These owners must be champions for the same and be visible across the organization.

An effective governance model is the first step toward mitigating systemic failure. The clearer you are about your goals, the better. Document and follow review mechanisms, communication protocols and escalation/exception handling mechanisms.

The most critical aspect of outsourcing is continuous assessment - assess continuous value addition from the project, outsourcing partner performance evaluation and goal achievement status. Always foster continuous learning and innovation in the ecosystem.

Measure Continuous Innovation

Success metrics are not limited to cost and timeline achievement, but they need to measure clear value addition and innovation targets.

Consider having tightly defined service level agreements (SLAs) and a risk/reward model predicated on multiple factors - ETL performance/load window SLA, OLAP query response time-related SLAs, database uptime SLAs and turnaround time for ticket resolution. Figure 3 shows a sample scorecard to measure the health of a BI off shoring engagement

Figure 3

These are normal SLAs that all of us would measure and monitor. Continuous improvement and learning comes from periodically tightening these SLA measures to drive innovation and best practices that foster continuous improvement. Complacency in your team and the partner's team can be mitigated by targeted improvement of metrics.

Increase the accountability of the partner by having a shared risk model and by involving them right through the spectrum.

Get Your Business to Own and Participate

If there are no sponsors from the business users and if there is no identified ownership from the business side, no BI initiative will ever succeed. Despite IT teams and a partner with rich experiences in architecting, designing, developing and implementing BI initiatives - the project starts with the business user and his need. A BI dashboard or a canned report has no meaning if they are not driving decision-making with the users. When you start, find the typical decision-makers using this application. What are the questions from their business perspective? This triggers the design, the architecture and the foundation for building nimbleness and scalability in the BI layer.

Whether it is the solution thinking, architecting design or master data stewardship and data quality checking - the role that the business owner plays is crucial and should not be short circuited.

Foster One Team Culture

Have no walls between the teams. Involve the partner team from the conceptualization stage, and communicate disconnects openly and early for better results.

Figure 4

To develop a two-way communication culture create standards for availability and acknowledgement, build a team collaboration space, isolate issues from people and keep the team well-informed about the progress and future requirements. This will help you in building a partner that feels empowered in a "no-surprises" culture.

Cultivate Work Ethics

Any BI initiative involves both high-end work and routine maintenance jobs such as manipulating master data dumps. Both your internal teams and the partner team should have the work ethic to attack all tasks with the same enthusiasm and rigor

Taking care of IP protection and maintaining data security are a given, but you must also assess the honesty, transparency and ethics of the company and its people. If integrity is a part of the DNA of the partner, then you can be sure of long-term success.

How can you create deals that survive the players? You will know that you are doing well when both sides contribute to each other's success, trust is recognized as an active ingredient, there is a sense of equality in the way the relationship is created and both sides think it is important to make each other commercially successful.

Voyage requires a helm to grasp, a course to steer and a port to seek," said Henry Adam. To summarize, BI outsourcing is a voyage - a well-considered roadmap, a shared vision and mind-set, business participation and the right partner who brings in innovation and experience can navigate you to the port that you seek.


Radha R heads the Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Practice for MindTree Consulting, an international IT and services company, co-headquartered in New Jersey and Bangalore, India. She is responsible for overall profitability and customer satisfaction for MindTree's DW/BI business across all global markets. With more than 17 years of industry experience, Radha has handled various product and service lines in her career. In her earlier role at MindTree, Radha was responsible for developing and cultivating all its India-based customer relationships.

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