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Managed BI Services: A Concept Map

While introducing a business intelligence (BI) center of excellent (CoE) Framework to one of the client's CIOs, it came as an insight that most clients look at such offering as additional dollar costs to be invested on the technical aspect of the BI solution rather than on the business solutions. This is because when we talk about offering various solutions like governance, architecture assessment, staffing, training, etc., it only looks like additional burden to be put on the client, toward implementing a BI solution. Hence, it does not come across as encouraging to the client organizations.

What is the way to go? The solution may lie in the more collaborative alternative called managed BI service.

Managed BI Service

Simply put, a managed BI service is the outsourcing of the entire BI business solution to a third-party managed service provider (MSP). This is in contrast to the current model of outsourcing only the BI technical infrastructure.

Imagine a BI client not having to worry about hardware, software, BI tools and technologies, software professionals or training for its BI solution. The client just gives a set of business requirements, which are translated in to an inventory of reports of varying types. These reports can be designed and developed by the BI managed service provider (BI-MSP) in collaboration with the client.

It is then the responsibility of the BI-MSP to deliver these reports to the client organization in the most efficient and cost-effective manner possible. The governance mechanism to ensure the smooth delivery of these reports by the BI-MSP to the client is through a set of mutually agreed-upon service level agreements (SLAs).

A Conceptual Managed BI Service Map

Figure 1 shows a conceptual managed BI service map:

There are typically two players in this model:

  • The client and
  • The BI managed-service provider (BI-MSP).

Let us discuss the flow of the conceptual map in Figure 1.

  • The client raises a set of report requests (of varying types, based on the business requirements) to the BI-MSP.
  • The client then defines the SLAs by which the delivery of the report requests are bound.

The SLAs are basically of three types: development SLAs, maintenance SLAs and operational SLAs.

  • The BI-MSP baselines the project based on a) the client's report requests and b) SLAs.
  • The BI-MSP decides on the choice of the BI tools and technologies. The BI-MSP also decides on the choice of the other supporting software, like the operating system platform, and also the underlying hardware to run the BI applications.
  • The entire security layer of the managed BI service infrastructure is owned and governed by the client organization.
  • Though the data is loaded in the BI-MSP's servers, the access to this data (at any point in time) is through the client's security layer.
  • The BI-MSP takes care of the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) for the report development, testing, deployment, training and ongoing production support and maintenance.
  • The final ready-to-use BI reports (in response to the client's report requests) are delivered to the respective client, within the agreed-upon SLAs.
  • It is to be noted that the security layer at all levels (i. e., hardware, software, tools and, most importantly, data) are owned or governed by the client. The BI-MSP may be privy to some or all aspects of the security layer depending on the agreed-upon terms in the breach of contracts document.

Costing Model for Implementing a Managed BI Service Map

In the traditional BI CoE services, the costing is mostly based on time, resources, tools, hardware and software that needs to be invested up front, in order to realize a BI solution.

However in a managed BI service map, the costing is done based on per-report. The BI reports can be categorized into various types, such as operational reports, canned reports, list reports, OLAP reports, OLAP cubes, dashboards, scorecards, etc.

The costing can be done at multiple levels:

  • Report category,
  • Number of reports of this category,
  • Data volumes of the reports,
  • The analytical value of the reports or the degree of analysis,
  • The complexity of the report,
  • The type of user accessing the report, and
  • Any other level.

Appropriate risk coverage should be done through data breach contracts and bank guarantees.

Categorizing Against a BI Reporting Maturity Model

It is advisable to have a BI reporting maturity model, which can serve as a guideline to decide on the costing for the BI service requests.

Figure 2 depicts a typical BI reporting maturity model, which consists of the following levels:

  1. Operational reports, consisting of list reports, subreports, cross-tabs, etc.).
  2. Canned reports, which are prebuilt and run on a click-and-display format.
  3. Drill-down reports, which need additional data preparation on the back end to facilitate the drill-down functionality.
  4. OLAP cubes, which are the multidimensional databases used for analysis.
  5. OLAP reports, which are the multidimensional reports run against the OLAP cubes.
  6. Scorecards report the various organizational metrics. A lot of additional effort is required in terms of data preparation and metrics definitions before the metrics can be presented in the form of a scorecard.
  7. Dashboards report the various organizational data in the visual format. These require additional tools and technologies to represent the same.
  8. Streaming data alerts are data streams which get scrolled on the user screens or are texted to the client's mobile phones. Though these do not exactly look like reports, they invariably are based on certain client-defined business rules. The client's user can derive various inferences by seeing these streaming data alerts, based on their experience and other circumstantial data known to them.

Pros and Cons of the Managed BI Service Map

Pros:

  • The client can be agnostic to the BI infrastructure (software, hardware, BI tools), SDLC process, staffing, training, maintenance and production support.
  • It is completely SLA-based and hence subject to ongoing improvements and improved efficiencies and cost-effectiveness.
  • There is scope for the client to adopt the Swiss challenge approach to choosing the BI-MSP/vendor.
  • Since the foundation of any SLA is a BI report, the managed BI service model is heavily report focused and hence more business aligned.
  • This model allows the client to resell its reports to its vendors and customers for strategic reasons, thus enhancing its market position.

Cons:

  • The costing based on the analytical value of the report can prove expensive, if the report requests are not properly categorized upfront. It is advisable here to follow a BI reporting maturity model to ensure that the client's BI report requests are well categorized.
  • Time/value of the BI analytical reports might reduce while the operating costs based on SLAs and the report category might remain the same (or even increase). To alleviate this problem, it is advisable to revise the report complexity of all new and existing report requests to ensure optimal costing at all times.
  • Information security is vulnerable and hence should be protected with an appropriate data breach contract.

While the traditional BI CoE model will stay on stage for some time to come, the advent of the service-oriented approach to information delivery will force the clients to shift to an SLA-based managed BI service model for easier, efficient and cost-effective reasons. This will shift the burden of creating and maintaining the BI infrastructure from the client team to the BI-MSP, thus freeing the client to be more business aligned by focusing on the core business requirements and the associated BI reports to be developed.

However for the managed BI service model to be cost-effective and successful, the associated costing model should also be competitive enough. It is here that it is advisable to use a BI reporting maturity model to ensure that proper report categorization is being done, towards achieving a successful, cost-effective, efficient and business-focused managed BI service delivery for the client. This will then bring in the paradigm shift in BI report delivery from the existing BI CoE model to the managed BI service model.


Harikrishna S. Aravapalli is a senior technical architect at SETLABS, Infosys and has 13 years of experience in databases, data warehouses and business intelligence technologies. He worked for Wipro and Accenture prior to Infosys. He may be reached at harikrishna_sa@infosys.com.

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