| Are You a BI Champion? |
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Three key steps to building your BI strategy Business goals? Check. Technology strategy? Check. Information strategy? Check. Better decisions for higher performance? Check mate Organisations often begin business intelligence (BI) or performance management projects without a strategy. These organizations quickly learn that small successes can lead to an unruly tidal wave of requests that can’t possibly be handled without prioritization. Opposite that scenario, organizations that don't focus on maximizing their "sweet spots" of information among their vast data stores find it difficult to demonstrate the business case and value behind the technology. By defining a strategy and understanding what you plan to achieve, you can lay an important foundation to getting a more strategic initiative off the ground. By defining both the business strategy and how the technology satisfies the need, you can go a long way to proving value to those who hold the purse strings. A well-planned BI and performance management strategy is one of the first critical steps to a successful initiative in any organization. Based on our experience with successful clients, we've identified three things to think about as you prepare your own strategy: Define your business strategy: Understand the sweet spots of information To define your business strategy, you need to have a basic understanding of what "sweet spots of information" are for the various areas of the business and understand and work with your business partners to determine which of these sweet spots will deliver you the most value when mapped against company strategy/time/resources and return on investment. Next, you need to prioritize them in a pragmatic way to ensure you can achieve steps of success with the most valued projects being accomplished first to gain buy-in and then engaging other areas as time and resources become available. Know that this exercise is not one that can or should be done alone – a strong partnership with your business partners is critical to defining the strategy. You can learn about the "sweet spots" of information to help you drive performance throughout your organization with The Performance Manager book or, join a half-day workshop in a city near you for the Performance Management Experience Workshop. Define your technology strategy: Deliver an enterprise platform for BI and performance management With a clear prioritized path in progress for the business strategy, you will also need to determine your technology strategy that will support this initiative. You can start by assessing where you stand now. Aberdeen provides a benchmarking and assessment tool that can help you determine where your organization ranks against the industry in terms of BI and PM and what is needed to successfully go above and beyond the rest. Then, you will need to determine what technologies you need to fulfill your goals. For enterprise-wide success, a platform for BI and PM that can offer you consistency in information coupled with the broadest range of capabilities for your different user types – dashboards and scorecards for executives, reports and dashboards for managers, deep analysis and scenario-modelling for your business analysts and planning, budgeting and forecasting – even with the Excel interface – for your finance department will better encourage a pervasive effort. Define your information strategy: Data you can trust Ensuring confidence in your data is critical to BI and Performance Management success. Users will blame the technology they see on their desktop – and thereby soil the reputation of the BI and PM platform –if they are not able to understand the data or if it is not consistent and accurate. To prepare your strategy, you should include how you plan to lay the solid data foundation to ensure confidence in your users. How will you integrate, model and manage that data? And what strategies will you use to ensure continuous monitoring, management and governance of your critical information Article taken from IBM Cognos' Performance Perspectives August 2009 |