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Pragmatic Business Intelligence and Scorecarding (Part 1)
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This white paper outlines the issues faced by BI operational staff in maintaining high quality of
BI information, and discusses technologies that have the potential to dramatically raise the
reliability and quality of BI information, improve how BI teams use their time and resources
to deliver rapid ROI and free resources to focus on answering business questions based on
reliable and meaningful data.
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In spite of all the articles and surveys about the gaps between business leaders and IT departments, the dream of an ideal information delivery world for business leaders and technical experts may not be that far apart. The business leader may dream of having easy access to scorecards containing key performance measures and colored alerts, easy drill-down to details, and consistent enterprise-wide reporting that integrates data from multiple sources so executives and managers all share one version of the truth. Idealists in the IT department may share that vision, but they are more likely to describe it in terms of an enterprise data warehouse that uses state-of-the-art ETL tools to integrate data from legacy systems, serving as a hub out of which various data marts and OLAP cubes can pull consistent data. Add in a well-defined semantic layer to enable reporting and easy-to-use reporting, analysis and scorecarding tools and the vision is one that most executives would probably be delighted with. Unfortunately, the journey from the current state of most organizations to such an information delivery utopia is usually a long and expensive journey—a journey which many organizations are unwilling or unable to make. The problems, conflicts and misalignment generally involve the difficult choices that organizations make when seriously limited time, funding and staff resources force them to settle for only small parts of the ideal solution.
As the IBM commercials have cleverly taught us, there is no magic pixie dust to solve these challenges. I don’t claim to have the ultimate wisdom in how to address this challenge, but in this article, I’d like to share some approaches we’ve learned from over 12 years of consulting specializing in the area of Business Intelligence and performance management. My goal is to share some pragmatic approaches that will provide helpful insights on how to get you best bang for the buck as you strive to deploy a real-world information delivery solution with limited time and resources.
To simplify this complex discussion, I’d like to pose the fundamental problem as a huge gap between:
- The multitude of legacy systems and fragmented data sources and
- Busy executives who need critical information and the ability to drill into details
(See Figure 1)
Figure 1
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