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)

1. Whether to use a ready-made solution or have it custom built
2. What degree of external staffing resources are required

This is the first part in a series about financing your BI deployment.

In addition project costs will be impacted by:

◊ The focus of the solution; operational or strategic

◊ The type of architecture selected

◊ The development methodology

These are all issues that the decision maker needs to be aware of whilst working with the business to initiate the project. Financial justification is of-course vital to this process. It is essential that agreement is reached by the project board based upon the holistic needs of the business. How the business interacts with the project and the resulting solution will in the end determine the success of the implementation. This is a corporate-wide decision to make.

Some of the decision may differ in scale when extending an existing Business Intelligence solution, but on the whole the various aspects of this article all have to be considered.

Ready-Made or Custom Built?

This is a decision that impacts the structure of the underlying database, the Data Warehouse. In the past it was a relatively clear-cut decision that few if any solutions provided alongside new operational applications could offer anywhere near the complexity necessary to support strategic decision making. Their only contribution was in respect of operational decision making. The strategic decision making required more data to be aggregated from multiple systems in order to provide the right results.

Each packaged solution requires some customised data and user interfaces to ensure it fits each end-user business. The business is also expected to change its processes in order to work with certain applications. The use of ready-made OLTP solutions has made the task of hiring business community staff and training them easier. E.g. Job advertisements for an Accounts Administrator can specify SAP experience.

So can this experience be applied to the implementation of the Business Intelligence solution? Much depend on the factors making each business unique and the range of applications that will continue to be used within the organisation. Few, if any, of the true BI focused applications feature highly in any business community staff resumes, so training is always essential.

From the systems side a changing IT landscape during the past twenty-odd years where we prefer to buy rather than build encompasses the possible use of packaged solutions for both the Data Warehouse and the BI tool-kit. In order to make such a decision it is necessary to consider the impact of:

◊ The corporate architecture including the complexity of data links

◊ The degree of integration of existing systems

◊ Factors of uniqueness for the business

◊ The suitability of analytical applications

All of which can assist in assessing the suitability of potential ready-made solutions. In all cases it is important to understand the general goals of the business’s market sector, for example in some statutory controls will have a large impact and in others none. It is always necessary to consider what your corporation’s principle competitors are measuring, if only to ensure that you exceed those minimums. It would be great to have a sneak peek at the competitor’s solution, but often industry journals give an expose on what they are doing – these can be analysed to identify the factors being measured.

Another impact is the factors of uniqueness, e.g. what your corporation brings to the marketplace – each company has them, make sure you identify them.

The third factor that need to be considered is the existing legacy IT architecture. Many corporations have already purchased some of the technology that is intended to be used for the solution. Many systems come with data integration elements. From a pure cost effectiveness standpoint you should look at re-use instead of purchasing a new ETL solution. Most companies have them – it is a matter of whether they are fit for the new intended use. Another area to consider is pre-existing and spare licenses for existing analytical tools – many corporations complain about the cost of licensing, yet do not effectively utilise the licenses they already have.

The next article in this series: “Types of Ready Made BI Solutions”