Klauer front end first by Radiant Advisors

Front End First: A Fresh Approach for Delivering BI Solutions By Dr. Patricia Klauer October 4, 2012 While IT focuses on acquiring the latest technology to serve up Big Data for performing Big Analytics, within every organization there remains a subset of business people who rely on MS Access and Excel applications for mission critical decisions. You know who I’m talking about. They are researchers, portfolio advisers, financial analysts, marketing, product, or operations managers. They are a secret society of creative and committed people who are dedicated to finding solutions to get their job done. I affectionately refer to this subculture as “Access Anonymous”. These people use anything in their power to get the job done, and they should be acknowledged for their ingenuity.

The Elephant in the Room Typically these Access Anonymous (AA) applications run on Microsoft Access or Excel, and have no security, data governance, quality measures, data access controls, or reliable back-up processes. And, these applications are, in many cases, mission critical. They are what the business units rely on to make key decisions about purchasing, corporate reporting, budget forecasting, or managing marketing campaigns. While IT focuses on the latest breakthrough technology in Big Data or Real-Time Analytics, vendors are bypassing IT and selling business discovery and dashboard tools directly into the business units. Powerful inmemory visualization tools with extensive backend capabilities to do quick and easy data integration are eliminating the limitations of MS Access and Excel, while providing high performance queries against detail data. This is a businessperson’s dream, enabling them with the tools they need to bypass IT and get their job done. So, what’s wrong with that picture? Why not enable the business in this way? Isn’t Self-Service BI the Holy Grail that every company has been aspiring towards? The business becomes empowered with intuitive access to their data quickly without a lot of IT resources, and that’s a good thing. Unfortunately, without a collaborative approach working with IT to manage and deliver data within the context of a framework that includes understanding the data semantics, governance, access, and security issues, there will be an increase of data quantity through a proliferation of dashboards. Simultaneously there will be a degradation of data quality, meaning, and value.

Putting the Business Back in BI Our role as BI professionals is to empower our business partners, rather than hold them back. If we embrace their need to quickly access data, we can turn them into champions by helping them do it better with standards, resilience, data quality, and performance. As BI professionals, we have the mandate to “put the business back into BI”. We need to ask our business partners what they need to do with the data. We can collaborate with them to better analyze, cleanse, and integrate. If they get access to the data, they will quickly point out the issues. In some cases the issues are process problems only they can solve, and IT should not spend endless hours in data forensics when a businessperson could handle the problem through education and training. By empowering our business partners to develop solutions they need to tune their processes and deliver products and services, we reignite our role in the organization. To emphasis this concept, imagine the parable of the blind men describing an elephant by feeling different parts of the elephant's body. One blind man who feels a leg says the elephant is like a pillar, another who feels the tail says the elephant is like a rope, and yet another who feels the trunk says the elephant is like a tree branch. Each blind man will continue to describe the elephant in pieces depending on his perspective,

www.RadiantAdvisors.com

until a sighted man walks by and describes the whole elephant. Sometimes we all benefit from stepping back and getting a different view. We are all right and we are all wrong when we cling to our separate perspectives without attempting to cross the chasm of misunderstanding with openness, innovation, and curiosity. What does a more productive and cooperative alliance between business partners and IT look like? We already know the wrong approach. Business people’s eyes glaze over when we begin to discuss data architecture, data governance, and other technical details – and rightfully so. We aren’t asked to understand the details of financial forecasting, actuarial tables, or an aliquot analysis. The vagaries of data semantics, syntax, governance, security, and access are esoteric at best, and mostly tedious to those who don’t have the language, understanding, and passion for data analysis to discuss it.

Bridging the Gap, Front End First We need to bridge the gap in communication and come to the table together to create effective BI solutions. We can’t continue to ignore the fact that the data produced within the organization is at least as important an asset as the product and services that are sold. The common goal is managing that data so it can be acted upon as valuable information. Front End First (FEF) is a fresh approach for creating a productive and cooperative partnership between IT and Business Users that acknowledges we all have the same goals, just a different perspective and focus. FEF has four major objectives: 1. Understand the types of data, reports, and application requests your business partners need. Understand the applications that are currently being underserved or supported through AA. Understand how they need to use the data, view the data, and take action based on the data. 2. Leverage new technology to empower users with the data they need upfront. This demonstrates that we are listening. The value lies in participating, instead of being bypassed. IT can team up on delivering the most appropriate solution based on clear requirements and an early understanding of data integration rules and data quality issues. 3. Design the right solution before investing in architecture. This allows IT to get a clear understanding of the usage of the data or application, and allows architects to focus on targeted data integration and master data management for the appropriate design and performance. 4. Collaborate on managing data as an asset of the business. When business partners understand the implications of their data integration decisions, they also begin to understand data governance roles and why they should act as data stewards. Data access rights and security considerations bubble up and can be discussed with real-world examples and implications, as opposed to simply signing off on policy documents. Once our business partners have access to their data in a manner that allows them to explore, they will begin to understand why IT must play a custodianship role. By describing each of our perspectives we begin to establish communication and open up an opportunity for collaborative engagement. Taking a Front End First approach acknowledges the business users perspective with data they need upfront and establishes collaboration that fosters an atmosphere of mutual understanding, respect, and trust. As a result, IT is able to offer BI solutions that are resilient and cost-effective, that support business objectives within the context of a framework, and that manage data as an organizational asset. --Dr. Patricia Klauer began her career as Doctor of Chiropractic licensed in California and Massachusetts where she practiced from 1983 – 1987. After working as a systems and database programmer at MIT, MCI, and Syntex, she spent the next 25 years in the field of large-scale data integration and Business Intelligence solutions for leading fortune 500 financial, telecommunications, manufacturing, and healthcare companies. She specializes in data architecture strategies and advises executives regarding the impact of technical architecture to support success in their business objectives. Dr. Klauer is the co-author of Building Data Warehouses for Decision Support, published by Prentice Hall. You can reach the author at patricia@eclipsedatasystems.com.