Perspectives & Strategy

This is the fifth article in a series about funding the Business Intelligence project. The analytical application can potentially be seen as the fun part of the project – it is after all the tool that the business community will be using for a significant time into the future.

In this context the adoption of analytical applications includes general reporting requirements (e.g. monthly sales reporting) as well as specialist applications (for example Activity Based Costing). This requires a projection of future need, but is still essential to determining the necessity of a pre-built Data Warehouse. Some applications will be tied to a packaged solution, whilst other options will have general availability.

Indeed when you are defining a ‘greenfield’ business intelligence implementation with a corporation that has few skills in the area it can be difficult to think about advanced analytics. The problem here is that some individuals will hail from other corporations that are analytically rich and these individuals want to launch into advanced analytical applications, when the traditional groundwork has not been laid out (e.g. a long history for analytics and a knowledgeable analytical team in the business).

Having recently worked with a growing mid-sized corporation who had recently appointed a new CFO to assist in their growth, she of-course came to the corporation bursting with ideas that had assisted her former employer to success, yet in the new environment there was no analytical capability and to make matters worse there were two accounting systems. She had a challenge on her hands, none the least being how she could implement the cost analysis modules she required.

The solution assessment  requires ratings for all analytical applications. It is essential to indicate all applications that are intended to be used in the future, even if this picture is currently uncertain. for example:

◊ Monthly financial reporting

◊ Ad-hoc queries

◊Customer Profitability

◊ Product Profitability

◊ Activity Based Costing

◊ Balanced Scorecard

◊ Inventory Analysis

◊ Business modelling

Identifying basic applications is as important the more advanced. It is essential to focus on those elements that are mission critical right now as well as its complexity to achieve. Complexity here is based on a number of factors including the immediate availability of this data. Where data components are not available today then the complexity goes up as the corporation has to consider how to obtain this data.

As an observation the reader will need to analyse the range of applications that are provided in association with any pre-built Data Warehouse in order to assess its suitability. Be aware also that many applications are based on data marts, these are focused data sets that should take data from the existing data warehouse database and restructure it to suit the analytical application being implemented. This mart should never be confused with the role of the data warehouse.

Next: “Which Solution is Best?”

Previous:

Part 1: Financing the Business Intelligence Project (Buy or Build?)

Part 2: BI Project Decisions: Ready Made Database Options

Part 3: The Corporate Architecture and Complexity of Data Links

Part 4: Financing the BI Project: Uniqueness Factors (or USP)