Obrien how good bi programs keep getting better by Radiant Advisors

How Good BI Programs Keep Getting Better By John O’Brien | Principal and CEO, Radiant Advisors October 25, 2012 Working inside your business intelligence (BI) program day-in and day-out provides insight to your program’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as where gaps exist and which areas need additional focus. Staying involved in the BI industry by attending conferences -- keeping an eye on trends, technologies, and case studies -- keeps industry knowledge and information relevant. Together, this acumen earns the unique instinctual hunches that offer the most value to ongoing BI programs. However, this insight isn’t the only input into the process of maintaining and sustaining your BI program. BI program experts should also engage in continuous improvement to ensure their programs continue to grow and remain relevant within their own organizations and markets. Using an iterative process of critical self-evaluation allows BI programs to stay innovative and perform successfully in today’s dynamic and shifting industry. Top BI programs regularly cycle through a rigorous process of evaluating the foundational interests within their BI programs, setting measurable benchmarks that align with BI mission statement and overall business objectives, and formulating an actionable execution strategy based on readiness to achieve to reach the next level of success in their BI program.

Recognize Foundational Interests Through our research and experience, we have identified five foundational themes of most interest for today’s BI programs. These themes focus primarily on capabilities that BI programs should use to develop and define goals and metrics against. It is important to note that these themes do not include any specific data set or subject area, which is a common case with mature data warehouse implementations. These foundational themes are: 1. Agility/Responsiveness: Ability to deliver on business needs; 2. Efficiency: Effective use of processes for repeatable and predictable delivery; 3. Data Quality: Trustworthiness of data delivered to the customer (degree of transparency and understanding of data characteristics); 4. End User Accessibility: Ability of Business Users to have access to existing data that meets their information needs (performance optimizations, real-time, latency, rationale for build, and end-user efficiency); 5. Emerging Needs: Ability to provide recommendations/investments that meet evolving business needs (Big Data, complex analytics, and sandboxes) Together, these five dimensions can be portrayed in a radar diagram -- or spider chart -- to reinforce the paradigm of how hard it is to simultaneously maximize and achieve high scores in all dimensions. However, in some cases focusing one dimension’s value might negatively impact or lower another dimension’s value. Concentrating on projects that are intended to increase aspects of data/information quality, for example, may introduce added efforts, scrutiny, or processes that hinder progress on initiatives related to efficiency. Attentive BI programs must be careful to maintain balance between each of these important themes and the needs introduced by business stakeholders.

Set Benchmarks After determining the foundational interests of your BI program, you must identify quantifiable aspects of your strategy. These aspects should be interpreted as metrics and used to establish benchmarks that can define measurable and achievable goals. One technique for this process is to employ bubble diagram sizing to represent the anticipated impact on the BI program, then leverage the bubble’s location to show which dimensions would benefit from these initiatives. Although visually implied, this approach does not mean that the order or organization of the dimensions will increase in one direction and therefore pull or decrease in another dimension.

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Align with the BI Mission Statement and the Business Strategy Experienced BI teams are masters of collecting data, building metrics, and delivering analytic capabilities to understand and achieve goals. The idea here is to treat your BI program as another business program that needs to be understood and measured as providing value to the business goals -- “BI about BI”, if you will. Confirm your goals are still in alignment with overall organizational objectives by turning the table and changing your perspective from the instinctive “bottom-up” to a “top-down” approach. Many companies have a valid and plausibly typical mission statement such as: To use data and analytics to provide timely and relevant information to business users in order to improve decision-making and identify strategic opportunities. The question for many BI programs is: how do I know how to achieve this mission? Begin by treating your BI program like a Customer Relationship Program or an Operations Efficiency Program, and break it down into measurable, tangible components. For example, the above mission statement can be distilled into three key words that comprise the overall essence of the mission: “timely”, “relevant”, and “strategic.” These key words become the cornerstones of measuring the successfulness of the BI Program -- a gage of whether or not it is accomplishing its mission. Maintaining a metrics portfolio approach means an “index” can be associated with each of these three key mission factors and defined as a combination of key performance indicators and metrics. Many individual metrics can be defined and developed over time to help understand the performance of the BI programs as well as help it to achieve its goals. Moreover, this approach reinforces alignment to the BI program’s mission.

An Execution Plan Relies on Readiness and Resource Assessments We have discussed two significant broad strokes so far. First, we have recognized the five key themes of most interest in our BI program. Second, we have created a framework for the effectiveness of our BI program based upon the BI mission statement and company strategic goals. As we move towards questions of how to budget costs and resources, let’s turn to the analysis that is key to action plans and convergence. As we analyze the relationships and cause/effect nature of the items previously discussed -- the five key themes for BI initiatives, the cornerstones of the BI mission, and the company goals and strategies -- here are a few additional action items that you may consider for your team: 1. Cultivate a base measurement system leveraging the design of survey questionnaires (or actual business process measurements) with the purpose of benchmarking the current BI state as related to the five key themes; 2. Develop and define a base set of metrics, KPIs, and indexes that align to the BI mission statement categories of timely, relevant, and strategic; 3. Evaluate the current BI initiatives for alignment and quantifiable contribution to achieving company goals; 4. Evaluate the information needs associated with the top five business strategies to determine whether new BI capabilities or processes are needed

Paving the Way to Innovative Program Management This discovery process is typical in well-established and mature BI programs that continuously challenge themselves to improve each year and become more engrained in the business. They begin by organizing what they already know, then align this with the strategic mission of the BI Program. Next, they confirm that goals and initiatives are aligned with -- and contributory to -- achieving the company’s strategic objectives. Finally, they create an execution plan to enact on those goals. BI programs that build upon sound principles of performance management -- and who consider and incorporate ongoing external research within the industry -- benefit from “a-ha” moments and thought provoking discussions that pave the way to innovative BI program management. Following the approach and framework we’ve described will allow you to evaluate many BI initiatives as candidates -- and most

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important -- adopt a measurement-based approach for the BI program that will go far in quantifying and recognizing the value of the program and its continuous improvement and self-aligning nature with accountability. This confidence and innovative spirit is what creates tomorrowâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best practices, and how the good BI Programs keep getting better. --John Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Brien, CBIP is principal and CEO of Radiant Advisors, a strategic advisory and research firm that delivers innovative educational materials, publications, and industry news. You can contact the author at john.obrien@radiantadvisors.com.