Between September and December of 2008, Gartner surveyed 1,527 CIOs worldwide. In their report, "Meeting the Challenge: The 2009 CIO Agenda," it is clear that information technology (IT) plays a critical role in the enterprise, especially in this uncertain economy. There are also some interesting implications to consider relative to business intelligence (BI) initiatives:

• Top business priorities were identified as improving business processes, reducing enterprise costs and improving workforce effectiveness
  
  
• Top IT priorities were identified as business intelligence, enterprise applications, and server/storage technologies
  
  
• One-third of CIOs reported no change in their budget from 2008, while 46% reported a slight increase and 21% reported a cut in IT budgets
  
  
• Flat IT budgets were found across enterprises in North America and Europe with slight increases in Latin America and a slight decrease in Asia/Pacific
  

The bottom line: IT is expected to deliver results while reducing enterprise and IT costs. Given this environment, our choice is to allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the magnitude of the challenge or have confidence in our ability to deliver.

These priorities may or may not resonate in your organization. However, regardless of the priorities your organization may have established, evaluating the effectiveness of your business intelligence initiative may be a wise strategy in the current climate.

Effectiveness, defined as doing the right things to achieve a goal, becomes even more important in uncertain times. Effectiveness may or may not be the quick fix. Effectiveness can give enterprises the flexibility to react to change; and if there is one thing that's certain during these uncertain times, it's that there will be more change. Business intelligence can be used to increase effectiveness by supporting the improvement of business processes, providing insight on costs and enhancing workforce effectiveness (or the priorities defined by your business). Additionally, if done correctly, business intelligence can help maximize value from existing enterprise investments.

How can your BI initiative support the flexibility of your enterprise if your solutions are short-sighted answers to immediate questions? How can you anticipate the questions that will be relevant and/or critical to the enterprise in the next six months or six years so that you can respond quickly and effectively with BI solutions? Ironically, at a time when budgets may be tight and there is extreme pressure for immediate results, perhaps the best approach for increasing effectiveness is to pursue activities that create a BI program that can adapt to changing business needs.

Unfortunately, under pressure, many organizations neglect two things that contribute to long-term success: program management and architecture. Program management can provide a future vision and road map for achieving success over a multiyear horizon, and architecture can provide a framework for responding quickly to changing business needs.

It reminds me of dieting and/or the current economic situation! If you've ever been on a diet, you know that short-term fixes do not address your weight gain. If you have over-indulged for a long period of time and gained significant weight, that is even more true. It takes time, persistence and a lifestyle change to ultimately achieve your goal. Likewise, in the current economic climate, people are looking for quick hits and immediate solutions. The economic situation we face was created by years of excess, over-indulgence and short-term gains. It will take time, persistence and a lifestyle change to ultimately fix the economy. The lack of data and systems integration has evolved over years of changing technologies, incremental purchases and short-term fixes. It will take time, persistence and a lifestyle change to fix the BI process.

Is your BI initiative exclusively focused on short term wins? There's nothing wrong with delivering on a need that is critical and immediate. However, if every project is in reaction to a critical and immediate need and you are living in a constant state of crisis, it might be time to assess your program management and architecture. There are multiple ways to assess your BI initiative, including a self-assessment, an outside assessment or a collaborative assessment where you work with an outside expert to learn potential improvements that could be made.

The advantage of a self-assessment is that it is cost-effective and you are familiar with your environment. The disadvantage of a self-assessment is that you are familiar with your environment and might not recognize alternative ways of doing things. We see what we see every day because "it's always been done that way" or there are political sacred cows. For example, the architecture may have been created by the current BI director, and it's difficult to challenge or criticize it when the designer of the architecture is your boss.

The advantage of an outside assessment is that you get a fresh perspective and benefit from what other consultants or companies have encountered. Outside consultants are paid to "tell it like it is" and are less prone to worry about politics. The disadvantage of an outside assessment is that it may be expensive, and there could be a lengthy ramp up time for the consultants to understand your environment. An additional disadvantage may be that the assessment is done "to you" instead of "with you," and there really isn't much explanation or knowledge transfer as to why recommendations are made.

The advantage of a collaborative assessment is that you get a fresh perspective and learn why recommendations are made. Additionally, since you are working with the outside consultant, the time to ramp up is minimized and may be more cost-effective. The collaborative approach also addresses the "sacred cows," but understanding may be accelerated by self-discovery. The disadvantage of a collaborative assessment is that you must allow some extra time for knowledge transfer and discussion about options. The (less) time required to ramp up and (more) time required for knowledge transfer impact the cost of the outside consultant.

If you choose to initiate a self-assessment, following is a sample of the types of questions you may want to consider. These are the same types of questions that we would potentially ask as consultants. The biggest difference is that we might interpret the answers and options differently based on our experience.

Program Management Questions

Architecture Questions

• What metrics do you use to evaluate whether your ETL processes are effective?
  
  
• What are the utilization levels of your production database servers?
  
  
• When you get a new request for information, how many layers of the architecture are impacted?
  
  
• How many layers exist in your architecture?
  
  
• How do you manage historical data?
  
  
• How do you audit your data?
  
  
• How extensively do you use metadata?
  
  
• How many ETL tools do you use?
  
  
• How many reporting tools do you use?
  
  
• How many DBMSs do you use?
  
  
• What is your standard OS environment?
  
  
• How do you manage configuration?
  
  
• What is your version control process?
  
  
• What is your release process?
  
  
• Do you have separate dev, test and production environments?
  
  
• How frequently do you update your data warehouse?
  
  
• How many data sources do you have?
  
  
• What are your typical data volumes by source?
  
  
• How many reports do you produce daily? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly?
  
  
• What data modeling tools do you use?
  
  
• What development tools do you use?
  
  
• How many data marts do you support?
  
  
• Are your data marts all star schemas?
  
  
• What reporting tool(s) do you use?
  
  
• How many power users (of the reporting tool) do you have?
  

Should you invest 100% of your time and budget on program management and architecture? Absolutely not! Should you invest 100% of your time and budget on quick hits that fill an immediate need? Absolutely not! Should you have a dual focus? Yes, and it's difficult to do.

Program management and architecture are two areas that do not typically get the attention they might deserve because of time pressure to deliver. Lack of focus on program management and architecture creates duplication and inefficiencies that impact the time required to deliver. It's a "pay now or pay later" proposition. It requires you to be resourceful in structuring your initiative to improve long-term effectiveness and agility...not just facilitate immediate gratification.

Bibliography

McDonald, Mark. "Executive Summary: Meeting the Challenge: The 2009 CIO Agenda."
McDonald, Mark. "Meeting the Challenge: The 2009 CIO Agenda Gartner Executive Programs."

 

SOURCE: Assessing Your Business Intelligence Initiative

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