2011

Business Intelligence An Endless Story

A White Paper
This white paper focuses on reasons on why BI, an strategic initiative by which organizations measure and drive the effectiveness of their competitive strategy is an ongoing activity.

MAIA Intelligence July 2011

Business Intelligence An Endless Story

Contents
1. Executive Summary ................................................................................. 3

2.

BI Project Life Cycle ................................................................................. 4

3.

Why BI projects never end? .................................................................... 8

4.

Conclusion ............................................................................................. 12

MAIA Intelligence White Paper

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story

1.

Executive Summary

Business Intelligence (BI) is a strategic initiative by which organizations measure and drive the effectiveness of their competitive strategy. In achieving this grand goal, there is need for analyze, software, resources, technical leadership, process leadership, executive champions and much more. It is a long term process and it can be broken down to goals, which are periodically analyzed for a good manage of resources and growth. It becomes difficult for anyone to comprehend where the BI project is heeded or when the project will finally end. Complexities related to BI project are numerous and come to fore only once the project is in process. BI projects have always been in progressive mode. Each upgradation in its maturity level has had its share of problems. And to remove those problems, BI project have been endless in its journey. Advancement in technologies, Request for new Key performance indexes (KPIs), Complexities of multiple interlinked systems and various other factors keep the BI project from ending. Let us look at the life cycle of a BI project and study the advancement in its maturity level and analyze factors which keep on extending the timeline of BI project.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story

2.

BI Project Life Cycle

The Project Life Cycle refers to a logical sequence of activities to accomplish the projects goals or objectives. Regardless of scope or complexity, any project goes through a series of stages during its life. There is first an Initiation or Birth phase, in which the outputs and critical success factors are defined, followed by a Planning phase, characterized by breaking down the project into smaller parts/tasks, an Execution phase, in which the project plan is executed, and lastly a Closure or Exit phase, that marks the completion of the project. Like any other project, BI project too has a lifecycle. Let us understand a BI project lifecycle and its associated complexities. Various stages of BI project lifecycle are: Business Case Assessment Enterprise Infrastructure Evaluation Project Planning Project Requirement Definition Data Analysis Application Prototyping Metadata Repository Analysis Database Design ETL Design Metadata Repository Design ETL Development Application development Data Mining Metadata Repository Development Implementation Release Evaluation

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story 1. Business Case Assessment: It includes lot of activities such as ROI, Cost benefit analysis, Risk assessment etc. There is no straightforward way to calculate ROI to justify the value of BI. A lot of the justification of an enterprise data warehouse really is based on someone at a very high level being able to conceptualize and envision the value of something that doesn't exist. You are dealing with things like the value of providing better service to customers and the value of people making better decisions faster. - Frank Brooks, senior manager of data resource management and chief data architect, BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee Most of the benefits achieved from BI are intangible benefits of strategic value such as faster reporting, better management information, better decision making, and more productive users etc which are tough to convert in figurative format. Most of the times executive get stuck in trying to quantify intangible benefits to approve BI projects from heads increasing wastage of time in 1st step itself. 2. Enterprise Infrastructure Evaluation: It involves Technical Infrastructure evaluation and Non-technical infrastructure evaluation. Technical infrastructure evaluation requires examining current hardware, middleware and DBMS platforms. NonTechnical infrastructure evaluation involves enterprise architecture and standards. Activities such as are the hardware, middleware and DBMS platforms compatible with new technology, would they require changes, can they be integrated with new technology etc. But technical evaluation is always easier than non-technical evaluation. Non-technical evaluation requires interaction and inputs from business heads. Non-technical evaluation is difficult to gauge until tool is used. 3. Project Planning: It involves defining and planning the BI/data warehouse project i.e. identification of all stakeholders, defining stakeholders matrix, extensive documentation of risks, full scope baseline development with explorations of alternative means of delivering the project scope, work based schedules, broadly developing timelines, human resource staffing , acquisition and team development plans. Also includes estimating cost. 4. Project Requirement definition: It requires analyzing and documenting general business requirement, project specific requirement, and project requirement definition activities. Business analyst needs to run their creativity and imagination and create different scenarios while drafting requirement documents. It requires also carrying out data gathering activities like interviewing business users, reviewing documents related to old system.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story 5. Data Analysis: It involves Business focused data analysis, top-down logical data modelling, bottom up source data analysis, data cleansing, data analysis activities etc. Top down logical data modelling involves integrating logical data model which is fully normalized and populated with key business attributes. Bottom up data modelling technique involves validating and mapping source data into logical data model, finding dirty data in source files and normalize it. Data cleansing or data scrubbing is the process of detecting and correcting corrupt or inaccurate records from record set, table or database(source: Wikipedia). 6. Application Prototyping: It involves activities related to creating a prototype of the application i.e. incomplete version of the software program being developed. A prototype typically simulates only a few aspects of the final solution and may be completely different from the final product. It becomes easier for business users to relate with the final solution before the final solution is actually developed. 7. Metadata Repository Analysis (MRA): It involves Metadata classification, metadata repository challenges, logical meta model and metadata repository analysis activities. Metadata classification includes business metadata and technical metadata. Metadata components ownership, descriptive characteristics, rules and policies, and physical characteristics. Working out challenges associated with metadata i.e. technical, staffing, budget, usability and political challenges. MRA activities include analyzing metadata repository, interface, access and reporting requirement. 8. Database Design: It involves logical and physical database design. It becomes difficult to create new database design over old database design and also modifying old database design possesses a challenge to project team. 9. ETL Design: It involves preparing for the ETL process, designing the extract, transportation and load program and process flow. Multiple applications and databases make ETL design a complex task. ETL designs need to be revisited at regular intervals to accommodate changes in business environment. 10.Metadata Repository Design: It involves designing metadata repository or/and licensing (buying) a metadata repository. Every time ETL design is edited/updated or improved, metadata repository design also needs to be revisited. Bigger the organization, greater will be the complexity in designing metadata repository. It is very difficult to have a perfect metadata repository in one shot.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story 11.ETL Development: It involves source data transformation, reconciliation, peer reviews, ETL testing, and development activities. Complex the design, more complex will be the development. Data warehouses are typically assembled from a variety of data sources with different formats and purposes. As such, ETL is a key process to bring all the data together in a standard, homogeneous environment. 12.Application Development: It involves online analytical processing tools, multidimensional analysis factors, online analytical processing architecture, and development environment. Application development is always in iterative mood as requirements keep on changing. Proper documentation and change management can help development team in accommodating change request. Design analysts should establish the scalability of an ETL system across the lifetime of its usage. 13.Data Mining: It involves defining data mining, specifying data mining techniques and operations. A data mining system may work perfectly with one set of data and perform significant worse with another set of data. Bigger the size of database, slower will be the result. Development team needs to introduce various methods to increase speed of output. If BI tool is slower in performance, it could lead to total failure of the tool. 14.Metadata Repository Development: It involves populating the metadata repository, metadata repository interface processes, metadata repository testing and preparing for metadata repository rollout. 15.Implementation: It involves security management, data backup and recovery, monitoring the utilization of resources, growth management. Many a times a system may perform exceptionally well at test site but fail on implementation. System needs to be tested keeping in mind the configuration of the site on which the system will be implemented. 16.Release Evaluation: It involves post-implementation reviews. Post-implementation various aspects, issues, advancement, future requirements come to the fore. Business users may ask for changes to current reports or development of new reports or KPIs etc. Once the business users start using BI tool, they understand how BI can help them in business and subsequently bring about changes in tool itself. Page MAIA Intelligence White Paper May 2011

Business Intelligence An Endless Story

3.

Why BI projects never end?

During the early days when the term business intelligence was yet to be coined, data was just being stored in varied ways and places. It was difficult to manage data i.e. input and output of data. And as there was no enterprise management system, there was no central repository of data. Lot of problems such as duplication of data, normalization of data etc existed. With inherent problem of management of data, it was next to impossible to carry out analysis of data. The most used software for maintaining data was spreadsheets. Also currently when new companies are being setup, we generally find data being maintained in spreadsheet or document files etc. But one thing common between companies in early 70s and start-up companies today is that data is used to answer the same questions Which products are best, How are my sales, How are my people performing etc. The companies whose IT departments are on the beginning stage, generally find themselves revolving around excel sheets, surrounded by paper works, trying to go through hundreds of documents in search of answers many a times which has to be done manually and also guesswork sometimes. Companies also keep few employees who are assigned the work of analyzing such data and finding out answer to the questions asked and generate reports to help various departments in their quest to take decisions. Such team is also called BI team. BI team would have the work assigned for managing the data, analyzing the data and generating reports. Once the companies grow, they generally look out for an ERP solution which would help them in maintaining data. This would help the company to maintain data in database and reduce lot of manual and paper work. But the effort put in by BI team is not affected much. The BI team still needs to put in lot of effort as data may not be normalized or required technical expertise to extract the required data. BI consumers are mostly concentrated among executives and managers, with a small group of analysts or operations users doing the manual work of pulling together data from various sources and creating basic reports

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story and analyses to feed to management. Reports and analyses are mostly provided on a quarterly or monthly basis, there is little capacity to deliver lower levels of information latency. Projects in the areas of finance, marketing or sales reporting can often be successfully deployed at this stage. An example of these types of projects would include departmental financial reporting, local or regional sales history and some level of sales forecasting. This BI project are generally carried out by in-house team or outsourced. First time BI projects often end up being unsuccessful, reason being mainly overambitious project scope and poor data quality that mostly cause project to run behind schedule and over budget. And when the results are finally delivered to the organization, business users are never satisfied citing reason as the new system does not answer their business question the way they anticipated. But the problem is that business users find it difficult to describe what they want until they see it. This ever changing targets and goals make it difficult for BI developers to succeed. Thus, a BI project that takes six to nine months to delivercommon for early-stage BI projectsmay answer the wrong questions and address the wrong problems. Consequently, many business users find themselves returning back to spreadsheets or access databases to collect, analyze, and report on business data. These documents generally provide conflicting views of information and performance that reduce decision making capabilities and prevent strategic alignment. With BI, Corporate and management can trace trends and analyze anomalies and ultimately align employee welfare to corporate goals. By using historical data, company can predict the number of employees it would need at certain point in time based on past movements in and out of the organization. This information can help companies plan and act in proactive manner rather than reactive one when it comes to recruiting. It is typically up to the spreadsheet developer to decide what metrics are important, what data needs to be included, how the data is formatted, and what level of aggregation is necessary. Spreadsheets become isolated and inconsistent data silos, and are difficult for analysts to extract, transform and load data into a central database to be interpreted at an enterprise level.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story Problems with Spread-sheets Reporting conducted in rows and columns Low degree of collective use High degree of inaccuracy and variability Limited security Limited collaboration Many organizations overcome these challenges and build successful BI solution, most of which are departmental in scope. Once the company has grown a bit in terms of turnover and no of employees, the company tries to custom built successful BI solutions. These tools are the basic initial level tool providing single dimension reports such as view used just for reporting purposes. These organizations learn the importance of building a data warehouse one subject area at a time rather than all at once, to minimize scope creep and data quality issues. Also multiple systems start to exist in the company creating integration problem. Data is departmentalized or even within specific application. Effort is put into development of ETL to develop views for individual reports or requirements stated by business heads. But because of lack of integration capabilities, most of the work is still done manually to gather data, and display it in proper format. BI teams work has not yet ended, it has just increased. Companies at this level have invested in BI for a limited number of managers or executives who need to drive tactical decisions. Employee and managers use their own metrics to run specific parts of business. Organizations still face major infrastructure issues to address, stemming disparate systems that create doubt about relevance and consistency of data and analysis. Executives lack confidence in quality and reliability of data. To remedy this problem and achieve a consistent view of shared business information, many executives initiate an enterprise wide data warehouse project. This executive which were previously fed with departmental data are given goal of consolidating data warehouses and deliver a more consistent set of corporate information and reports across all departments.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story With a fast changing environment, delivering a common set of business semantics among changing strategies and new economic conditions becomes a tedious and difficult task for organization to spend time and money. Getting all departments to work together is a huge task in itself. Getting different departments and business units to abandon their customized solution, let alone agree to use standard terms, definitions, and rules or adopt a corporate standard for BI reporting and analysis tools, is never easy. Once all of the above tasks are carried out, stronger commitment is found towards BI and PM among senior executives. Metrics are formally defined to enable management to analyze departmental performance and there is a rising demand for management dashboards. BI tool are designed to be more user-friendly, interactive reports via dashboards, scorecards, and parameterized reports that make BI more accessible to majority of users in the organization. They also begin to augment the historical data in their data warehousing environment with timesensitive or real-time datadata that is delivered to users within hours or minutes of an event or transactionso users can work proactively to solve problems and capitalize on opportunities. Moreover, the business value of their endeavors grows exponentially as more data and users are supported by the new enterprise environment. The purpose of the BI solution is no longer only to gain understanding and awareness, but to deliver actionable information that can spell the difference between business success and failure. Here, BI becomes a mission-critical system designed to optimize processes and performance on a day-to-day basis, and in some cases, on a minute-by-minute basis. These BI systems run the business, and in some cases, drive the market by providing a competitive advantage. Finally the BI tool is designed to reach across to all employees of the organization with the help of security features that help designate report to each and every employee. This is known as Pervasive BI. Thus BI project has been continuous as the organization has grown. Even after this the work in BI project is yet to end. BI market has seen advancement happening at continuous intervals. Advancements such as Mobile BI, BI as a service, Improvements in visual representation of data such as Maps, increase in speed, advance reporting, predictive analytics etc. do not allow BI team to rest. Companies have understood the value of BI and what BI can deliver. The work allotted to BI team may increase or decrease but the project may never end.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story

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Conclusion

BI has always been one of the most progressive projects in IT of any organization. BI team has been working day and night to keep up pace with advancement in BI market. BI projects have always been continuous and are yet to see the day when BI project will end. BI projects have always been on a roll leaping from one roll-out to another. But the question is will BI project ever end? It seems that a BI project in any organization is an endless story, which everyone likes and uses utmost.

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story

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Business Intelligence An Endless Story

MAIA Intelligence is a software product company in Business Intelligence (BI) MIS reporting and analysis space. MAIA Intelligence, a young and innovative company is committed to developing powerful yet affordable and scalable BI solutions, has emerged as a growing entity in the market place. MAIA Intelligences flagship offering 1KEY BI caters to strategic, tactical and operational users requirements across the organization with a self-serve BI tool for dynamic MIS, ad-hoc reporting and complex analysis. With its mission to democratize BI, MAIA has made BI available to masses. Commenced in the year 2006, MAIA Intelligence, has always strived to meet the needs of corporate implementations, application service providers and value-added resellers. MAIAs innovation has revolutionized the way BI can be deployed. With installation & database connectivity happening in 2 working days, organizations are ready to deploy BI from the 3rd day with instant dynamic reports. For further information on MAIA Intelligence and its offerings, visit www.maia-intelligence.com.

1KEY Business Intelligence Software, helps companies take informed and better decisions at all levels. 1KEY BI is developed on Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. It has been specifically designed to cater to high levels of simultaneous access to huge data reporting on various platforms of Windows and databases. 1KEY BI can accommodate thousands of users, connect multiple applications, integrate disparate data sources and deliver visually stunning, multi-formatted and flexible cross functional reports and analytics. The solution connects and communicates to all type of applications, irrespective of the database used at the backend. It helps the organizations to analyze and derive more meaningful and accurate information that will facilitate faster and, consequently profitable business decisions. 1KEY BI provides visual reporting and guided analysis for business users. 1KEY BI software product is geared toward business users with needs not met within their existing BI tools. It provides a very intuitive, interactive and highly visual interface that lets users see problems, both summary and details, in a very understandable way. 1KEY BI caters to any industry vertical including Manufacturing, Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), Healthcare & Pharmaceutical, Services, Construction & Allied, Public Sector, Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), Retail, Logistics, and Hospitality. The solution caters to the reporting and analysis demands of business users across the organization in all horizontals like Purchase & Procurement, Manufacturing & Distribution, Sales & Marketing, HR, and Finance & Accounts. 1KEY consists of wide range of components, with a variety of features to suit different business requirements.

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