Best Practices in BI: 8 Questions CEOs Should Ask Before Investing in BI

6.  How do I mitigate unplanned technical feasibility challenges?

Most organizations truly don’t understand the challenges that lie ahead when preparing data for the data architecture.  Why would they?  Only apparent need manifested from a BI reporting and analytics requirement bring to light a slew of potential issues.  The question is, can this be mitigated as early as the planning phases of a budget procurement process?  Fortunately, the answer is yes.

Technical feasibility in the BI sense is an assessment of challenges when preparing data for planned and unplanned business requirements.  The goal is not to find every single nuance you may encounter in a project, rather to quickly understand apparent challenges and patterns in the data you are about to acquire and consolidate.

7.  What BI platform provides a best fit for our organization?

From a Technology perspective, there are lots of choices out there and certainly all BI Platforms are not created equally.  In order to determine best fit for the organization, there are 3 primary decision drivers.  These drivers are listed as follows:

1. Consideration for a Vendor Preferred strategy.  The vendor evaluation process will be weighted leveraging the familiarity, investment , internal skills and integration of an organizations current state footprint to the BI Vendor Evaluation process; 

1. Understanding BI Usage Profiles.  Understanding the profile of each potential BI constituency or business group is fundamental to understanding best fit.  Each usage profile is associated directly to the role serviced within the organization itself.  As any given role adopts BI as part of their own decision support process, there are certain behaviors or characteristics exhibited by that role.  Categorizing these characteristics allow BI Analysts to better understand choices for back end data architecture and front end BI product mix.

1. Understanding the underlying BI Platform Design Philosophy.  This topic may not be so apparent at first; however BI Platform architectures are optimized for certain usage profiles or usage cases in mind.  During the BI tools evaluation process, it is important to understand the core feature set – what tools are designed to do and what they are not.

Consider the following feature categories within a BI Platform: 

• Production (WYSISYG) Reporting
• Business Query (ad hoc) Reporting
• Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) 
• Dashboards
• Scorecards
• Alerting & Notification
• Microsoft Office Integration
• BI Search

8.  What should I do to get started?

Begin with the BI Strategy Roadmap.  BI Strategy Roadmap is designed to mitigate the risks associated with the program and is optimized to achieve quantifiable results for each constituency and the collective organization.

Major tasks within the BI Roadmap are listed as follows:

1. Organizational Requirements Collection and Consolidation
2. Business Justification
3. Technical Feasibility Assessment
4. Implementation Planning Roadmap
5. Infrastructure Planning. 

Each of the questions presented is predicated on industry best practices in Business Intelligence.  Collectively, the questions provide an organization with a charter to effectively prepare a BI Strategy Roadmap.  Iteration is the key – Think Big, Start Small.