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What should be in place before companies invest in Business Intelligence?
Is there a checklist of things that need to be in place prior to purchasing a BI system?
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2 Answers
There needs to be a lot of homework done before purchasing a generic BI system.
1. What do you want to accomplish with BI in the organization?
2. Is there a champion on the business side who will drive and oversee the BI initiative?
3. Is management committed to moving the organization to a more data centric organization?
4. What is the readiness of the organization to use data to make decisions, derive strategy, and the ability to ask the right questions of the data to get the right answers.
5. Is the data availabe? What systems do you have to draw from? Is the data normalized (including definitions, formats, etc)
5. Conduct a BI/Data readiness assessment for the organization.
6. Is there a plan in place to educate people regarding the change process that will need to take place to truly change how decisions are made?
7. Is there a rollout plan in place? Probably have some time here but the design of the system to some degree and the data first populated will depend on the roll out plan.
8. Have you researched the available tools available? There are some that are more user friendly than others. This will be critical to get the busines side to use them effectively.
9. Will definitions and metrics of success have to be changed to accomodate a more data centric culture.
10. Start slow and build momentum and acceptance through incremental wins. Slow doesn't connote snail's space but does mean don't get to far ahead of the organization in regard to readiness and usage.
I have seen and know of too many organizations that put a BI solution in place without consideration of the above and ending up wasting a lot of time, energy, resources and capital.
I agree that there are a number of things that should be put in place before starting a BI initiative, I disagree that BI is a system you can simply purchase.
#1 in most everyone's books is: requirements. What is the business trying to meet or accomplish?
#2 I think should be: By WHEN? Tasks and projects and goals usually never get met without a time-line.
#3 Don't try to boil the ocean.. In other words, break out the project and the goals in to feasible release phases and assign timelines to each phase.
#4 Assess Skills: Find out who has what skills, so that you can find out what RISKS you might be running in to, and develop a mitigation plan. Get training for the employees if the risks are high.
#5 Define & Assign roles & Responsibilties, INCLUDING business users - establish the Alpha, Beta, Gamma release teams for testing and understanding. Then define what you will deliver.
#6 Hardware/Software assessment: determine if the machines will meet the needs, determine the growth rates of data sets, determine if you will be running near-real-time, etc... Sometimes a heavy investment in new infrastructure is needed before starting!
Then, you can focus on all the steps the previous poster put in place.
In my mind, BI systems are about PEOPLE, then PROCESS, then Technology. In that order.
Hope this helps,
Dan Linstedt
http://danLinstedt.com - Innovative BI solutions through Data Vault Modeling and Methodology
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