BI and Strategic Decision Making

Phillip HigginsProcess Intelligence Ltd

Business Strategy

• Strategic plans must be available to support strategic BI– BU level– Shared enterprise level

• Coherent set of measures representing departmental objectives

Strategic Decision Making

• Made by an organisations top leaders• Infrequent• Critically affect an organisations health

The BI Roadmap: Gartner's BI Maturity Model

Accountants Role

• SME’s over financial and some operational data

• Let IT handle implementation– Experts in avoiding technical debt• Reusability• Scalability• Integration

Technical Debt

• Is about choosing solutions which are expedient in the short term

• More costly over time

New Engagement Models

• Agile approaches eg Scrum, XP

• SME’s working closely with BI staff

Agile or planned?

• Organisational culture

• Requirements for BI– Tactical report development (perhaps more agile)– EDW implementation (perhaps more plan driven)

• Both forms of BI development will require sitting with users to determine requirements – the second form is likely to be within a more structured framework

Assessing your Organisation

Assessing your Requirements for BI

• Risk and complexity are the main determinants of either agile or planned engagement practices

• User adoption is everything• Working closely with users is required for both

agile and plan driven BI

Note on Planning

• Rigid plans will generally fail for many BI solutions:– Impossible to fully specify solutions as problem

domain too complex– Most solutions involve high degrees of technical

and business complexity so unknowns omnipresent

– For both planned and agile approaches requirement revision should be accounted for

Collaborate and Review

• Engage throughout the entire delivery cycle• Review work frequently to ensure correctness• Insist on testing as new work becomes

available soon as possible

The Two Big Gaps• The BI Delivery Gap– Delivery cant keep up with changing requirements

• The Insight Gap– The business does not possess the required

process or expertise in order to make sense of the data they are collecting

What's are we in for in 2012

• Mobile computing– Ubiquitous – Huge growth• by 2013 33% of BI features will be consumed via

handhelds (Gartner)

• Cloud will gain acceptance• Big Data gone mainstream• Visualisations and Mashups mainstream

Conclusions

• Reaching a BI sweet spot– Advanced technology mainstream– Greater business relevance

Questions?

philliphiggins@gmail.com