UNIT 3 BUILDING

A BI PROJECT
ARISTOTLE ONASSIS SAID:

"The secret of business is to know

something that nobody else knows."
BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT

• Business environment is changing, and its become

more complex (pressures).
• Force them to respond quickly.
• To take a quick decisions they need a relevant
amount of data, information and knowledge.
 CHANGING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS
AND COMPUTERIZED DECISION SUPPORT
• The Business Pressures-Responses-Support Model
– The business environment
– Organizational responses: be reactive, anticipative, adaptive, and
proactive
– Computerized support
• Closing the Strategy Gap One of the major objectives of BI
is to facilitate closing the gap between the current
performance of an organization and its desired performance
as expressed in its mission, objectives, and goals and the
strategy for achieving them
CHANGING BUSINESS ENVIRONMENTS
AND COMPUTERIZED DECISION SUPPORT
BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT FACTORS

FACTOR DESCRIPTION
Markets Strong competition
Expanding global markets
Blooming electronic markets on the Internet
Innovative marketing methods
Opportunities for outsourcing with IT support
Need for real-time, on-demand transactions
Consumer Desire for customization
demand Desire for quality, diversity of products, and speed of delivery
Customers getting powerful and less loyal
Technology More innovations, new products, and new services
Increasing obsolescence rate
Increasing information overload
Social networking, Web 2.0 and beyond
Societal Growing government regulations and deregulation
Workforce more diversified, older, and composed of more women
Prime concerns of homeland security and terrorist attacks
Necessity of Sarbanes-Oxley Act and other reporting-related
RESPONSES TAKEN BY ORGANIZATIONS INCLUDE:
–Employ strategic planning
–Use of new and innovative business models
–Restructure business processes
–Improve corporate information systems
–Improve partnership relationships
–Encourage innovation and creativity
–Improve customer service and relationships
–Move to electronic commerce (e-commerce)
–Move to make-to-order production and on-demand manufacturing and services
–Use new IT to improve communication, data access (discovery of information) and
collaboration
–Respond quickly to competitors’ actions (e.g., in pricing, promotions, new products and
services)
–Automate many tasks of white-collar employees
–Automate certain decision processes especially those dealing with customers
WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?
• Business Intelligence means using your data assets to make better
business decisions.
• Business intelligence involves the gathering, management, and
analysis of data for the purpose of turning that data into useful
information which is then used to improve decision making.
• Organizations can then make more strategic decisions about how to
administer clients and programs.
• These practices can also reduce operating costs through more
effective financial analysis, risk management, and fraud
management.
WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?
Business Intelligence enables the business to make intelligent, fact-based
decisions

Aggregate Present Enrich Inform a

Data Data Data Decision

Database, Data Mart, Data Reporting Tools, Add Context to Create Decisions are Fact-based
Warehouse, ETL Tools, Dashboards, Static Information, Descriptive and Data-driven
Integration Tools Reports, Mobile Reporting, Statistics, Benchmarks,
OLAP Cubes Variance to Plan or LY
HOW IMPORTANT IS BI?
Top 10 Business and Technology Priorities for 2011:
1. Cloud computing
2. Virtualization
3. Mobile technologies
4. IT Management
5. Business Intelligence
6. Networking, voice and data communications
7. Enterprise applications
8. Collaboration technologies
9. Infrastructure
10. Web 2.0
Source: Gartner’s 2011 CIO Agenda (aka “Reimagining IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda”).
WHAT ARE THE BENEFITS OF USING BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE?

• Accelerating and improving decision making

• Optimizing internal business processes
• Increasing operational efficiency
• Driving new revenues
• Gaining competitive advantages over business rivals.
• Identifying market trends
• Spotting business problems that need to be addressed
WHY SHOULD YOU USE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
SYSTEMS AND TOOLS?
Business intelligence tools are essentially data-driven Decision Support Systems (DSS).
Business people can start analyzing the data themselves, rather than wait for IT to run
complex reports.
  Business intelligence software systems provide historical, current, and predictive
views of business operations, most often using data that has been gathered into a data
warehouse or a data mart and occasionally working from operational data.
Software elements support reporting, interactive “slice-and-dice” pivot-table analyses,
visualization, and statistical data mining.
Applications tackle sales, production, financial, and many other sources of business data
for purposes that include business performance management.
EXAMPLES OF BI SOFTWARE

1. Sisense 2. Looker
3. Datapine 4. Zoho Analytics
5. Yellowfin 6. AnswerDock
7. Hotjar 8. ReportPlus
9. QlikView 10. Tableau
MAXIMISE VALUE FROM BI SYSTEMS
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY
• A business intelligence strategy refers to all the steps you undertake
in order to implement business intelligence in your company.
• It goes all the way to diving in the BI process, defining the
stakeholders and main actors, to assessing the situation, defining the
goals and finding the performance indicators that will help you
measure your efforts to achieve these goals.
• You define the strategy in terms of vision, organization, processes,
architecture and solutions, and then draw a roadmap based on the
assessment, the priority and the feasibility.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STRATEGY
• Business Intelligence (BI) Strategy, also called descriptive analytics,
utilizes software and resources for transforming organizational data
into actionable intelligence, aiding the organization in making
strategic business decisions.
•  IBM researcher Hans Peter Luhn summarized BI as, “the ability to
apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as
to guide action towards a desired goal.”
• In a result-oriented and data-driven culture, it is surprising to see
that many organizations fail to register the 
importance of leveraging BI tools to move ahead in the
competition.
FIVE KEY AREAS
• BI tools do not make decisions for the organization, rather assist them in
understanding and analyzing the data and to drive insights and build a strategic
plan. 
•  Business Intelligence Strategy points the five key areas that need to be kept in
mind while creating or updating a BI strategy are:
– BI roadmap, 
– stakeholder management,
– architectural blueprint,
– capability improvement and
– implementation planning.
• A BI Strategy in place, an organization is more likely to achieve intelligence
pertaining to its productivity, costs and market competitiveness.
FIVE KEY AREAS
• BI Roadmap
– for use as a start-up to a BI strategy implementation project.
– A BI Roadmap should explain what is in scope and what is not covered by the
strategy.
• Stakeholder Management
- identify who are the key information consumers, which subject areas are critical to
the business and what challenges are in the pipeline to a growing organization.
- Maintaining a healthy relationship with the stakeholders holds the key to a good
business because they are either financially or otherwise committed to the
organization and can be influenced by the operation and productivity of the business.
- getting the right people involved at the right level.
FIVE KEY AREAS CONT…..
• Architectural Blueprint
- The blueprint will define how the BI provision would be structured so that
it can most effectively deliver the information required to the people who
need it.
- how the BI estate will look and operate.
• Capability Improvement
- what needs upgrading, re-developing or decommissioning.
– companies which start life using spreadsheets and MS-Access databases for
MI.
– As that organization succeeds and grows, however, more heavyweight
analysis tools should be investigated.
FIVE KEY AREAS CONT…
• Implementation Planning
- Once the strategy has been defined and agreed by the key
stakeholders the next question is how to implement the strategy?
- The expected levels of documentation should be determined and
the sills required to implement the strategy should be identified.
BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION PROJECTS
BUSINESS TRANSFORMATION
• Business Transformation is a change management strategy which has
the aim to align People, Process and Technology initiatives of a
company more closely with its business strategy and vision.
• In turn this helps to support and innovate new business strategies.
• For any transformation of a business or business processes innovation
is one of the key drivers.
• Transformation relies on implementation of effective market and stay-
in-business strategies that attract more profitable customers in selected
markets and lower operating costs.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MATURITY MODEL
• One of the first steps in any BI project is an assessment of your
company’s readiness and capabilities for business intelligence. 
• That is where a Business Intelligence Maturity Assessment comes
in.
• A Business Intelligence Maturity Assessment determines what is the
business need for BI, the ability of business processes and
operational systems to support BI, the level of progress of current
BI initiatives, future BI plans, and outlines the appropriate steps
needed to make BI work.
BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE MATURITY MODEL
A Business Intelligence Maturity Assessment helps companies to determine:
• Business Need – Define what are the top business needs and demands for BI, as well as
the benefits a BI program will bring to your company
• Availability of Information – Whether the company has all the information they need to
answer their current business questions and identify and easily support new business
opportunities
• Current Business Intelligence Capability – Assess the effectiveness of your BI
organization and governance, identify current and future users of BI, assess the extent of
transforming existing data into meaningful information, define standard KPIs and
business transformation rules
• Review of Current BI Systems – Including decision support, ad hoc query and reporting,
analysis, forecasting, and data mining
• Information Latency – How timely and up-to-date current information is and what gap
analysis exists between current situation and future needs
AMERICAN SAP USER GROUP (ASUG):
BI IS FRAGMENTED AND NOT PERVASIVE
Gartner’s BI & Performance Management Maturity Model

# 1 Problem: Making BI pervasive among business users; BI is still

too hard for most users.
KEY FINDINGS OF BI MATURITY MODEL
• A BI program / project includes people, skills, processes, metrics
and other components, as well as technologies.
• As the BI program / project matures, the architecture will evolve
together with the processes and skills needed to support it.
• Organizations at lower maturity levels often have siloed processes,
disparate systems and data sources, and are heavily reliant on
spreadsheets.
• Organizations at higher maturity levels have integrated processes,
use agile development, set enterprise standards for data and systems,
and combine internal data with external data.
WHAT IS A SCORECARD?
• A scorecard is a type of report that measures and compares your
performance against your projections and goals.
• It evaluates the success and failure of your efforts, based on key
performance indicators (KPIs).
• These KPI’s must be determined early which allows management
to successfully evaluate progress compared to expectations.
• Scorecards are most commonly used to track KPIs, as they focus on
both the current status of the metric being tracked and the target value.
• Scorecards are generally periodic measures, usually updated at set
intervals such as weekly or monthly.
BI SCORECARD
Steps :
Derive KPI's from the strategy
• Scorecards are meant to measure strategy execution.
• It is therefore obvious that KPI's who are monitored in the scorecard
should be the representation of a Critical Success Factor of the
organization's strategy.
Define SMART metrics
• metrics need to measure some aspect of strategy, there are a number of
criteria that we can use to find out whether a metric is suitable for the
scorecard.
SMART METRIC
The paradigm we use for this is SMART:
• Specific: Specific means that the objective is concrete, detailed, focused and well defined. The
objective must be straightforward and emphasize action and the required outcome. Specific also
means that it is result and action-oriented. Metrics need to be straightforward and communicate
what you would like to see happening.
• Measurable: If the metric is measurable, it means that the measurement source is identified and
we are able to track the actions as we progress towards the objective. A good metric is also
measurable at a reasonable cost. If you cannot measure it ... you cannot manage it.
• Achievable: The metrics and targets that are set need to be capable of being reached; there should
be a likelihood of success but that does not mean easy or simple. The objectives need to be
stretching and agreed by the parties involved.
• Relevant: Linked to business objectives, the owner needs to have the power to influence the
result.
• Time-based: The time dimension should be specified, not only how often the metric is
measured/reported, but also by what time certain targets need to be met.
PLANNING A BI PROJECT
PLANNING A BI PROJECT
• Project planning is not a one-time activity. Since a project plan is based on
estimates, frequently no more than best guesses, project plans must be adjusted
constantly.
• The sequence of activities for preparing a project plan is the following.
– Create a work breakdown structure (WBS) listing activities, tasks and
subtasks.
– Estimate the time for effort, for the above.
– Assign resources to the activities, tasks and subtasks.
– Determine the task dependencies
– Determine the resource dependencies.
– Determine the critical path based on the dependencies.
– Create the detailed project plan.
FOUR (4) KEY PLAYERS IN BI PROCESS
The Data Analyst
• A statistician by nature, they will drill deep down into data, looking for fresh insights that will be used to underscore
business strategy. The role includes documenting all your business data, identifying patterns and creating reports and
dashboards that will support the decision-making process.
The Executive
• Business intelligence gives an organizational overview that allows the CEO to spot trends across the entire structure
of the business – insights that can support:
– Business growth
– Innovation
– Operational efficiency
The Business User
• Business intelligence users can come from across the organization. We often talk about two types of business users,
the casual business intelligence user and the power user. The difference is that a power user has the capability of
working with complex data sets, while the casual user will make use of dashboards to analyze predefined sets of data.
The IT Team
• IT is another key player in the BI process. The IT user still plays a central role – maintaining the infrastructure and
giving departments the tools that allow them to fulfill their own data requests – however, the role has become more
rounded.