TM
Avoid the business intelligence graveyard
plan for change, focus on agility
Damien Georges
Contents
So What’s the Problem? ................................................................................................................................... 2
What’s the Solution? ........................................................................................................................................ 2
If you work at a firm that doesn’t plan to do any more deals, doesn’t partner with
other firms, doesn’t plan to ever acquire another firm or be acquired then you can
stop reading here and save your time. For the rest of us, business has a tendency
to change. If you find yourself scrambling all over the place every time someone
thinks up a “distressed debt fund”, buys a portfolio or wants to focus on a whole
new set of data, I would suggest you keep reading. We have a few ideas that you
may find interesting.
We recently had the opportunity to take a post-mortem look at a number of
business intelligence initiatives for prospective real estate and private equity clients. Despite having billions of dollars in assets under management, massive I.T.
staffing and an abundance of business support, the majority of initiatives have
either failed, are on life support or are so far disconnected from the original vision
they may as well have not been implemented. Common complaints included:
• The vendor oversold us on a BI vision
• I.T. doesn’t “get it”
• The business doesn’t “get it”
• The project just couldn’t spend any money
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Avoid the Business Intelligence Project Graveyard
Plan for Change, Focus on Agility
TM
So what’s the problem?
Business intelligence projects take too long. They cost too much. The business doesn’t understand
the technology and the technology team doesn’t understand the business. These issues aren’t
complicated but they are pervasive, and until they’re addressed real estate and private equity firms
will struggle to get anything but the most rudimentary installations of business intelligence in their
environment.
What’s the Solution?
Focus on the notion that your business will invariably change. When
you focus on agility as the highest-level requirement everything else
falls nicely into place. But you are thinking: What about data transparency? What about data quality? What about wiz-bang reporting?
What about meeting IFRS requirements? What about my portfolio
company valuations? What about my leasing pipeline?
Make all these requirements — and anything else you may be
thinking about — secondary and focus on implementing an agile
solution.
When you think about it, everything else in your technology arsenal — other than Excel — is fairly fixed. You have systems: beholden to technology platforms, difficult to implement, difficult to convert, a pain to modify and in constant need of external help. Take a
different approach to business intelligence then with these systems
and you will maximize your chances of project success. If you tie your solution to a fixed number of
systems, processes or assumptions then your chances for success diminish exponentially.
Start with a generic data model that is technology agnostic and doesn’t replicate any single
system. You can build it from scratch, although you may want to leverage something that gives
you a starting point to accelerate development. Hipercept is in the process of developing data
models to support private equity and real estate KPIs and analytics. They won’t meet 100% of your
requirements but they are designed from experience with some of the world’s largest real estate
and private equity firms.
Once you have the data model in place you have a foundation to build more complex analytics, implement data governance programs, and finally get a comprehensive understanding of what
your portfolio is actually doing. You still need to solve the integration and orchestration challenge
but the data model is more than half the work in any business intelligence project.
Leverage the data model to accommodate information from both internal and external data
sources. This is a solution for the constant issue of collecting and aggregating portfolio company
and joint venture partner information. It’s also a solution for any third party sources of data. This
will help measure portfolio exposure and risk and, if implemented correctly, will ultimately lead to
better overall investment performance.
The data model is
more than half the
work in any business
intelligence project
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Avoid the Business Intelligence Project Graveyard
Plan for Change, Focus on Agility
TM
For more information, contact us directly at [email protected].
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