Strategic Consultant

Business Intelligence and Business Problem - Tactical or strategic approach?
Do it on Strategic way!
– Establishing a BICC, Implementation methodology, Project Management Methodology, Platform and
Tools Selection, Data Governance and Data Quality Policies, Standardization/Corporate Data Dictionary
Project prerequisites (in details)
Business Case Definition, Project Organization (roles and responsibilities), Designing
Architecture, Project Plan, Mentor, Business Owner
Project Implementation(in details)
– Business Requirements Analysis, Data Model definition, Data Source Analysis, Mapping Data Sources to the Data model, OLAP & UI modeling, Data Integration, OLAP & Front end development, Technical
Deployment, Stabilization, Project Acceptance, Project Risk Mitigation (Risk Matrix, Issue Log)
Using Microsoft BI platform for STRATEGIC implementations
– Data Integration - Microsoft SQL Server Integration services
– OLAP & data Mining – Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services (Cube, Hierarchies, KPI, prediction)
– User experience
• Microsoft Office Excel as powerful BI Client (predefined and free form reports, pivoting, data visualization)
• Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services
• Integration Microsoft Share Point Portal Server (dashboards)
Miscellaneous
– Improve platform with Metamodel and custom developed components
The new wave – Office 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2
Hands On – Solution Outline

Must be composed from the right proportion of business and technical people. In general, there is a 3 ways to compose the DW team:
• In house – consist of recourses available inside of the organization
• Combined – In house resources with outsourcing (usually consultancy or development) resources
• Turn Key – fully outsourcing, which means that organization will buy solution from DW vendor

Once project team has defined, you be required to define roles and responsibilities on the project. Project roles are: Project manager, technical leader, business analyst, data model modeler, developers (ETL, OLAP, front end), technical stuff (for platform deployment)

Project Management and
Implementation Methodology must be defined.

Must be chosen among most influential persons in the organization (member of top management group) in order to preserve authority required to solve the project obstacles

Person within the organization who has crucial interest in business deliverables of DW
(usually head of department – e.g. Head of Risk department in case of implementing Risk management on top of DW)

Formal or informal organization, which must be permanent, consist of BI team, Mentor,
Business Owner and other people within or outside of organization interested in current or further usage of benefits of DW. BICC mission is to establish strategically deployment of DW within the organization

From technical perspective (initial scope of data warehouse, could be wider then business deliverables) and from business perspective (what deliverables will get business users as a result of the project). Scope of the project must be defined as detail as possible in order to minimize risk of misunderstanding. In order to estimate scope feasibility you must consider results of preliminary analysis

Timeline consist of all project phases and activities, milestones, resources used, deliverables deadlines

Budget of the project has significant influence on other factors mention above.

Definition
• A BICC is an
Organizational structure
• Groups people with interrelated disciplines, domains of knowledge, experiences and skills
Purpose
• Promoting expertise throughout an organization
Synonyms
• Center of Excellence
(COE)
• Competency Center
• Center of Knowledge

Lower Cost of
Ownership
Deliver performance management/deci sion support capabilities BICC
Higher and Faster
BI adoption
Identification of new opportunities leveraging on BI
Standardization of
BI

• Operational Systems
• Operational Data Store
• Data Warehouse
• Best practice
• Support Services
• Documentation
Data Models
Standardization
Process
Standardization
• Promotion
• Training
• Technology/Infrastructure
• Data Governance
• License management
Infrastructure development
People relations

To little IT
May not scale or extend
To little business
Won’t be adopted
To much IT
Won’t mach business requirements
To much business
System may be isolate from other systems

• Typically funding per project
Tactical BI
Strategic BI with early BICC
• Funding still at the project level BICC funded as an overhead budget line item
• Project level funding with a consolidated
BI roadmap, BICC budgetary line item
Strategic BI with a maturing BICC

Organization’s perception of
BICC
Enhance
Where and how it could be implemented ?
Build

BICC is essential for strategic deployment of BI throughout organization
BICC have to be built using phased approach leveraging on strategically plan
Keep focus even if things not going such well as you expected
Enhance (the maturity of) your BICC over time

There’s no single enterprise view of data
Inability to gather data for as yet unspecified reporting requirements.
Senior Management requests for information require intensive manual effort to respond, and far longer than desired.
Multiple databases or spreadsheets storing similar data; no common data
“dictionary” across the enterprise
No ownership of data
Difficulty complying with regulatory requirements like
Basel II Accord
Senior management questions quality, timeliness, reliability of information used to make multi-million dollar decisions
Difficulty answering questions about the origins and business processes performed against data
Inability to consolidate data from multiple diverse sources
Difficulty in building a single architecture to address both data consolidation and data aggregation requirements.

Data Governance is orchestration of people, process and technology to enable an organization to leverage data as an enterprise asset:
All lines of business
All geographies
All functional areas
Data governance strategy helps deliver appropriate data to properly authorized users when they need it. Moreover, data governance and its data quality component are responsible for creating data quality standards, data quality metrics, and data quality measurement processest hat together help deliver acceptable quality data to the consumers— applications and end users

What data exists in the environment?
In what form it exists and how it is transformed from system to system across the enterprise?
Where it comes from?
How one data element relates to another?
Where it is resides?
How business terms and data elements should commonly be defined and used across the enterprise?
How it got there?
How and why a data element does or does not vary from the accepted and common corporate definition (if one exists)?

Data owners are those individuals or groups within the organization that are in the position to obtain, create, and have significant control over the content (and sometimes, access to and the distribution of) the data. Data owners often belong to a business rather than a technology organization. For example, an insurance agent may be the owner of the list of contacts of his or her clients and prospects.
Data stewards do not own the data and do not have complete control over its use. Their role is to ensure that adequate, agreed-upon quality metrics are maintained on a continuous basis.

Marketing : Ads, spreadsheets, targets, accounts, forecasts, webinars, seminars, conferences, booth notes, feedback, customer contact notes
Operations : Manufacturing runs, defective products, reservations, claims processing, precious goods store, delivery notes, scheduling notes
Sales : Sales leads, sales calls, sales meetings, sales forecasts, spreadsheets, performance evaluations, customer meetings
Shipping : Delivery directions, fragile specifications, cooling temperature specifications, time of delivery specifications, speed of delivery specifications, tracking
Accounting : Spreadsheets, notes, Word documents, audit trails, account descriptions
Call center : Conversations, notes, replies
Engineering : Bill of material, engineering changes, production archives, design specs
Finance : notes, annual reports
Human Resources : Emails, letters, hiring offers, termination documentation, evaluations, job, specifications, employee manuals, holidays, policies
Legal : Agreements, amendments, proposals, contracts, meeting notes, telephone transcripts, patents, trademarks, nondisclosure

(Project Management Institute’s Body of Knowledge (PMBoK)
Project Integration Management
Project Scope Management
Project Time Management
Project Cost Management
Project Human Resource Management
Project Communications Management
Project Risk Management
Project Procurement Management
Project Closure
46

Snapshot LinkedIn discussions

Tom Fuhriman
Owner, KnowledgeTraks KM Consulting Services
Identify, understand and manage the organization's culture (which I define as the shared values, beliefs, emotions, and attitudes of the organization's members).
Identify and enlist the support of the key influencers in the organization . These often include, but are never exclusive to the leaders identified on the org chart.
Identify and initially focus on the areas within the organization where the highest, fastest, and most easily identified and tracked ROI can be realized. Use this ROI to justify and increase continued focus, budget, and commitment to the Initiative.
Analyze tools requirements: It is absolutely critical that this deeply involve a cross section of end users - both from the "create and capture" community as well as the "consumer" community - and not just IT and managers. This tool team needs to say involved throughout the implementation and integration of the tools into the organization's culture, systems, and processes. It is also critical that the tools are integrated into successful processes, as opposed to creating processes based on what serves and matches the limitations of the tools (which is what most companies end up doing).
Test all new processes, tools, systems, and strategies within a limited subset of the organization, and after proving your strategy, methods, and systems, then roll out to the rest of the organization in well managed, phased implementation. An organization-wide implementation has very little chance of success, unless the company is relatively small.
Choosing the right teams to use as for phase 1 is critical to your success.

Cindi Howson
Founder, BI Scorecard
The organizational factors are more important than the technical, and I would think about success factors along those two categories. For technical, data quality and all that involves
(including MDM) is important. For organizational, in our surveys, the executive level support, business-IT partnership , and alignment with business goals come out top 3
Kamran Elyaspour
Pre-Sales Consultant at CTG
In my experience the involvement of business is the most important critical success factor.
Business owns the data and must consult reports. As a data quality project in which a data steward (somebody from the business who guards the quality of data) a BI-business analyst must be defined to verify the content of the reports and look and feel. IT only owns the infrastructure. Therefore in many BI-projects in which IT carries out the project, the final delivery is submitted to delays. This is due to the fact that business is not involved from the beginning.
Other critical success factor is the data quality. Every transactional data base contains errors.
This is due to the fact that there is a certain lack of data standardization and lack of uniform business rules. Also the transactional data bases might contain structural errors. The best possible way to remove these errors is use of a data quality tool, before the ETL-processes.

John Wilson
CEO Claim Insights
Success at the end of the day for a BI initiative should only be measured in terms of does the BI solution give the business the tools to get as much value out of the data as possible and are they using it to drive strategy and results? The technical pieces, while essential to wringing as much value out of the data as possible are simply creating process. Others have mentioned but IT can't sound the success bell if they deliver but the business side can't use it to derive value. There needs to be full alignment between IT and Business regarding how success is measured. A BI initiative should not be a project that traditionally has a beginning and an end. BI, to be successful, has to become a way of thinking, a means of driving the business, and a way of developing and directing strategy to achieve desired results. Without that all that has happened is a lot of money is being flushed down the toilet.
Matthew Geise
Senior Director, Services Technology
The number one factor in any technology project (including BI) is user adoption . With this understanding, the importance of the contributing factors roll out much more clearly.

Mauricio Campos Suarez
IT PROJECT MANAGER at Merck Sharp & Dohme
In my personal experience the five main success factors are:
1. Business ownership (real ownership of the solution)
2. Business needs understanding (including hidden needs like those related with political aspects in the organization or personal managers needs)
3. Clear workflow, oriented to answer business question (How...? How much...? When..?, etc) and communication to all the users as part of the training
4. 'You mustn't start building the house with the roof' Data are the foundations of our building, any BI solution will fail if data are not clean, structure, documented and complete
5. Keep it as simple as possible
Neil Raden
President Hired Brains: Consultant/Analyst/Author in Business Intelligence and Decision Management
There are too many concepts here that have never been rigorously investigated and are just accepted as truth. "Identify, understand and manage the organization's culture?" How can a BI consultant manage a company's culture? Executive buy-in? What does that mean exactly? BI isn't about expectations or requirements because no one know what they are until you get into it.
I agree with Dan Vesset about a BI program, not a project . BI should be woven into the fabric by now.

the organization's culture the involvement of business key influencers in the organization the data quality alignment with business goals full alignment between IT and Business user adoption Data are the foundations
BI program, not a project

© 2010 Asseco SEE. All rights reserved.
The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the opinions and views of Asseco SEE and/or Bojan Ciric. The material presented is not certain and may vary based on several factors.
Portions © 2009 Asseco SEE & entire material © 2009 Microsoft Corp. Some slides contain quotations from copyrighted materials by other authors, as individually attributed or as already covered by Microsoft Copyright ownerships. All rights reserved. Microsoft, Windows, Windows Vista and other product names are or may be registered trademarks and/or trademarks in the U.S. and/or other countries. The information herein is for informational purposes only and represents the current view Asseco SEE as of the date of this presentation. Because Asseco SEE & Microsoft must respond to changing market conditions, it should not be interpreted to be a commitment on the part of Microsoft, and Microsoft and Asseco SEE cannot guarantee the accuracy of any information provided after the date of this presentation. Asseco SEE makes no warranties, express, implied or statutory, as to the information in this presentation. E&OE.