”Business Intelligence Roadmap”

Author Larisa Moss

Engineering processes are iterative

The Dynamics of a BI Decision-Support Project

Stage 1 - Justification

”Assess the business need that gives rise to the new engineering project”

Business Cases Assessment Definitions of problems and

opportunities

Business Justification Components

Business drivers:

Identify the business drivers, strategic business goals, and BI application objectives.

Ensure that the BI application objectives support the strategic business goals.

Business drivers:

Without strong business drivers and without an alignment with the strategic business goals of the organization, the BI decision-support initiative may falter.

Substantiate your business justification.

Do not invent a business case where one does not exist just to get the BI project approved.

Interview senior managers to confirm the organization's strategic goals, and interview business managers and business analysts to validate the BI application objectives.

Business Justification Components

Business analysis issues:

Define the business analysis issues and the information needed to meet the strategic business goals by stating the high-level information requirements for the business.

In most organizations, business analysis issues usually revolve around unmet information needs from current heterogeneous data sources and poor quality of the source data.

Three Major Data Sources

Operational Data

Online transaction processing (OLTP) and batch systems provide internal operational data about subject areas, such as the following: Financial Logistics Sales Order entry Personnel Billing Research and engineering

Private Data

This internal departmental data usually comes from the desktops and workstations of business analysts, knowledge workers, statisticians, and managers.

Examples include the following: Product analysis spreadsheets Regional product usage spreadsheets Prospective customer databases

External Data

Organizations often purchase external data from vendors that specialize in collecting industry-specific information available in the public domain, such as the following: Health care statistics Customer profile information Customer catalog-ordering habits Customer credit reports

External Data

External data is usually clustered around the following categories:

Sales and marketing data: lists of prospective customers Credit data: individual credit ratings, business viability

assessments Competitive data: products, services, prices, sales

promotions, mergers, takeovers Industry data: technology trends, marketing trends,

management science, trade information Economic data: currency fluctuations, political indicators,

interest rate movements, stock and bond prices Econometric data: income groups, consumer behavior Demographic data: age profiles, population density Commodity data: raw material prices Psychometric data: consumer profiling Meteorological data: weather conditions, rainfall, temperature

(especially for agricultural and travel industries)

Business Justification Components

Cost-benefit analysis:

Estimate costs for building and maintaining a successful BI decision-support environment.

Determine the ROI by assigning monetary value to the tangible benefits and highlighting the positive impact the intangible benefits will have on the organization.

Business Justification Components

 Benefit Categories

Risk assessment:

The technology used for implementing the project

The complexity of the capabilities and processes to be implemented

The integration of various components and of data

The organization and its financial and moral support

The project team staff's skills, attitudes, and commitment levels

The financial investment in terms of ROI

Definitions

BI vs. Traditional systems Business need => business opportunity Cross organizational developement From operational requirements to

strategic information Business analysis =>system analysis Incremental development (waterfall

deployment) rather than “big bang”

Summary of the Model

1Business

Case Assessment

Enterprise Infrastructure

Evaluation

Enterprise Infrastructure

Evaluation

Project Req. Definitions

Application Prototyping

Meta Data Repository Analysis

Data Analysis

ImplementationRelease

Evaluation

Database Design

Meta Data Repository

Design

ETL DesignETL

Development

Application Development

Data Mining

Meta Data Repository

Development

Justification Planning

Business Analysis Design Construction

Deployment

Discussion/Questions

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