Whitepaper
Reinventing Your BI Landscape
Published on: August 2011 | Author: Karthikeyan Sankaran
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Whitepaper
Reinventing Your BI Landscape
Table of Contents
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1. Reinventing Your BI Landscape
2. The BI Reinvention Program
BI Profiling Questionnaire
Ten-Point Framework
3. The Future State - BI Radar
4. Conclusion
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Whitepaper
Reinventing Your BI Landscape
Reinventing Your BI Landscape
Every business software system has an economic life. This essentially means that a software application exists for a period of time to accomplish its intended business functionality after which it has to be reinvented. This is a fundamental truth that has to be taken into account when
a product is bought or for a system that is developed from scratch.
During its useful life, the software system goes through a maturity life cycle - This can be referred to as it the “Value Curve” to establish the
fact that the real intention of creating the system is to provide business value. Business Intelligence Value Curve typically goes through the
following phases as shown in the diagram:
Stage 1
Deployment & Proliferation
Business Value
Proliferation
of subject
areas creates
duplication
of data
Tangible
benefits
from DW
Experiments
and some
successes
Stage 2
Leveraging for Enterprise
Decision making
Extend
approaches
that work
Tie into broader
framework for
future
Stage 3
Integrating and sustaining
Higher levels
of integration
Address
scalability
issues
Newer technologies
to be Evaluated
Usage decline due
to lack of data
completeness
Newer technology
adopted
Build knowledge
into products
Assess DW
for appropriatness
and leveragability
Baseline
Stage 4
Reinvent
Increasing problems
with DW scalability
Time
The Business Intelligence Value Curve
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Reinventing Your BI Landscape
Stages
Description
Stage 1 - Deployment and Proliferation
The BI infrastructure is created at this stage catering to one or two subject
areas. Both the process and technology infrastructure are established and
there will be tangible benefits to the business users. The initial success
makes way for more subject areas being brought into the BI landscape
and that leads to the first list of problems – lack of data quality, completeness and duplication of data across data marts / repositories.
Stage 2 - Leveraging for Enterprise Decision Making
This stage takes off by addressing the problems seen in Stage-1 and
overall enterprise data warehouse architecture starts taking shape. There
is increased business value as compared to Stage-1 as the Enterprise
Data Warehouse becomes a single source of truth for the enterprise. But
as the data volume grows, the value is diminished due to scalability issues.
For example, the data loads that used to take ‘x’ hours to complete now
need at-least ‘2x’ hours.
Stage 3 - Integration and Sustenance
The scalability issues seen at the end of Stage-2 are alleviated and the BI
landscape sees much higher levels of integration. Knowledge is built into
the set up by leveraging the metadata and the user adoption of the BI
system is almost complete. But the emergence of a disruptive technology
(for example – BI Appliances) or a completely different service model for BI
(e.g., Cloud Analytics) or a regulatory mandate (e.g., IFRS) may force the
organization to start evaluating completely different ways of analyzing
information.
Stage 4 - Reinvention
The organization, after appropriate feasibility tests and ROI calculations,
reinvents its business intelligence landscape and starts constructing one
that is relevant for its future. The reasons are both business and technology related. Reinventing does not mean, “Throw out everything you have
and start from scratch”. Re-inventing, at least in the context of this paper,
is to look at new ways of providing BI solutions to stakeholders in an
organization.
The motivation to reinvent can be many. It is understood that the organization has already felt the need to reinvent (or reorient) and it is now
only a matter of “How to do it”.
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Reinventing Your BI Landscape
The BI Reinvention Program
Reinvention, in simple terms, is to move from Point A (Current State of BI in the organization) to Point B (The Future State).
Point A - Current State of BI
1
Need to understand the business model
and core strategy of the organization
2
Profile the organization to investigate the
necessityand propensityt to reinvent
3
Analyze the BI landscape to find the
current state of BI in the organization
4
Identify the tactical and strategic reinvention possibilties
Point B - Reinvented State
1
Menu of possibilities for reinvention
2
Straddles Business and Technology space
3
Reinvention falls into 2 major categories - “
What gets delivered and ”how”
What is Reinvention?
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Whitepaper
Reinventing Your BI Landscape
Peter Drucker proposed the concept of a Business X-ray in his famous book “Managing for Results” with the notion to analyze the current
state of the business before taking any action (across products, markets and distribution channels) to make the business better. Similar to
that notion is the concept of “Business Intelligence X-Ray”.
Buiness - BI Profiling
1
Set of 30 questions administered
to key stakeholders in the organization
2
Covers the following areasat a high level:
Business process,BI Architecture, Data,
Analysis (Knowledge), Decisioning
3
Focused workshop to explain
the results and finding of profilling
exercise
Technology - 10 Points Framework
1
2
3
Covmprehensive analysis of the BI
tecnology landscape from multiple
angles
Has a set of qualitative and
quantitative assessment parameters
Identifies potential Reinvention aread and
provides technology recommendation
The Business Intelligence X-Ray
The first step to reinventing your BI program is to calibrate the current state of the BI landscape. Though many organizations do this in many
different ways, we at Hexaware, use 2 major tools, perfected over a period of time. They are:
●
●
BI Profiling Questionnaire - This measures the customer propensity and necessity to reinvent.
Ten-Point Framework - This is a detailed framework that looks at the current landscape from 10 different dimensions (viz. Sources, ETL,
Reporting, Security, Metadata etc.) and provides a health sheet on the current state.
These two tools put together constitute the Business Intelligence X-Ray for any organization. With this, the organization has a good feel for
where they currently are (Point A). Point B, where you want to go, is basically a menu of items straddling the entire spectrum of possibilities
(viz. Platform migration, Consolidation, EII, Data mining, Simulations, Complex Event Processing, Customer Experience Analytics, Cloud
Analytics, DW Appliances etc.).
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Reinventing Your BI Landscape
BI Profiling Questionnaire
The first part of the Business Intelligence X-Ray is the Profiling Questionnaire. This questionnaire has a set of questions and covers the
following areas:
●
●
●
●
●
Business Process
BI Architecture
Data
Analytics or Knowledge
Decisioning
This questionnaire is answered through a focused workshop which involves all the key BI stakeholders and provides the first view of current
state of BI landscape. This workshop is followed by an education session on those new areas within BI that are relevant for the organization.
Ten-Point Framework
Ten-Point Framework looks at the BI technology infrastructure from ten different dimensions and provides a set of recommendations for each
of the areas. The coverage is as tabulated below:
The Ten-Point Framework
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Reinventing Your BI Landscape
The Ten-Point Framework covers the following areas:
Area of Focus
Reporting and Delivery
Description
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Data Integration
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Data Sources
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Data Quality
●
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Enterprise Data Model
●
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Reference Data Structure
Determine user groups, audience data characteristics and reporting requirements of users
Study the challenges involved in reporting and delivery mechanism across the current and
the desired environment
Identify the security requirements for reports
Identify the performance and frequency requirements for reports
Study the current data integration process
Analyze the existing tools that are used for data extraction
Understand the Error handling and auditing process
Understand various sources of data
Analyze the source system data
Understand source system dependency, feed layout, frequency and mechanism of data
transfer
Understand the change data capture process
Audit current databases
Study the accuracy of data
Study the existing conceptual, logical and physical data models
Study the entity relationships
●
Understand existing system process and data flow
Study the existing data architecture
Security Framework
●
Study the existing data & information security
Metadata Availability
●
Study the existing metadata
Study the metadata capture process
●
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Standards & Process
●
●
●
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Study existing business process and problems
Study the current information flow
Analyze existing business requirements
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Reinventing Your BI Landscape
The Future State - BI Radar
The future state of BI in an organization has a menu of possibilities both in terms of changes to “What Information gets delivered” and also
on “How Information gets delivered”. At Hexaware, we call this the BI Radar and once the current state assessment is completed, the possibility of Reinvention in the specific organizational context becomes clear with specific boundaries. Some of the possible options are shown
in the diagram below:
What gets Delivered
1
Move from Reporting to high - end
predictive Analytics
2 Specific Industry Focused Packaged BI
3 Unstructured Data Analysis
4 Simulations
5 DW Consolidation
6 CEP (complex Event Processing)
...............
How BI Gets Delivered
1 Agile Methodology for BI
2 On-Demand / Cloud Analytics
3 Open Sources BI
4 EII (Enterprise Information Integration)
5 Information as a service
The BI Radar
6 DW Appliances
7 Column Major DB / In - memory Analytics
Conclusion
...............
In summary, the following are the key highlights of this whitepaper:
1. Periodically reinventing the BI landscape is a necessity in all organizations to derive the full benefits of BI implementation.
2. Reinvention, in simple words, means moving from Point A (Current state of BI) to Point B (Future state of BI)
3. To assess the current state, a methodology called “Business Intelligence X-Ray” is proposed. This comprises of 2 parts – BI Profiling
Questionnaire and the 10 Point Framework
4. Once the current state is assessed, organizations have a menu of choices for the future state of BI. In our organization, we call this the
“BI Radar”.
5. The Business Intelligence X-Ray along with the BI Radar can help organizations move in the right direction in their journey to “Reinvent
the BI programs” for maximum business impact.
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Whitepaper
Reinventing Your BI Landscape
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