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Three Great New Year’s Resolutions for BI
If you’re like most people this time of year, you spend some time reflecting on what is most important in your life, thinking about your priorities, and finding renewed commitment to advancing in the areas that truly matter. Maybe you will make a New Year’s resolution to join a gym, drop a few holiday pounds and get in shape. Or maybe your resolution will be about devoting more quality time to your family. Whatever the case, the end of the year provides an opportunity to take a step back out of the daily execution of plans laid long ago and evaluate whether priorities could be shifted to improve your life and the lives of those around you. In this way, New Year’s resolutions are about becoming a better person.
The New Year provides an opportunity to reflect on and improve our BI delivery
BI teams can also benefit from taking a step back to reflect. In doing so, it’s easy to recognize that the purpose of business intelligence is not to build complex data structures or make sure database columns have standard names. Similarly, the purpose of a BI team is not to manage metadata or optimize SQL queries or consolidate disparate data sources. While often on the business intelligence “to-do” list, these tasks are secondary to BI’s primary purpose – helping users answer questions and make timely business decisions. Though logic tells us never to favor secondary tasks at the expense of primary goals, so many of us are guilty of doing just that on occasion.
So as we move into 2011, let’s take a few minutes to step back, reflect on the past year and consider whether committing to a few resolutions might increase the efficacy of our BI teams and add more value to the business in the New Year.
BI New Year’s Resolution #1: Strengthen the delivery of BI essentials.
Much like eating better and exercising more, focusing on and optimizing delivery is a good resolution every year – or even every quarter. More than likely, your BI team has lost some weight since the start of the economic downturn. But has the demand for information from the business scaled down as well? Almost certainly not. Most organizations have a much increased need for timely information in order to navigate fast-changing markets and unpredictable economic currents. Thus, BI teams should focus on helping the business get that information as quickly and efficiently as possible. And that’s all about delivery. By improving BI capabilities and finding ways to deliver better solutions, you can minimize the low-value and inefficient re-work that seems inevitable once business intelligence solutions hit User Acceptance Testing.
BI New Year’s Resolution #2: Use rapid prototyping to shrink the report backlog.
Many people resolve to get out of debt or be more financially responsible at the turn of the year. BI teams can take a hint and seek to get out of the “debt” represented by long report backlogs. Such backlogs are like having business users stand in a line waiting to ask their questions so that they can make critical business decisions.
But, for many BI teams, that line never seems to get any shorter. That’s because every delivered report answers one question, but it may spur ten more. Instead of staying on this treadmill, trying to keep up with compounding backlog of report requests, use rapid prototyping during the first few days of a new effort to identify and anticipate the follow-up questions a new report may generate. BI teams can collaborate with user teams to identify these questions so that they are incorporated into initial solutions.
BI New Year’s Resolution #3: Engage with business leaders to become the go-to team for answers.
Here’s an important question to ask yourself honestly about the past year: do business users come to you first when they have an important issue to address, or do they reach out to the BI team only as a last resort? Unfortunately, many teams fall in the latter camp. That’s not good news for anyone. The best way for your BI team to increase its value to the company in the New Year is to become an indispensable resource and trusted advisor – a “wingman,” if you will – to the people making critical business decisions.
Obviously, BI practitioners don’t have to know the answers to critical questions off the top of their heads, just how to find those answers quickly and based on reliable data. So, moving into 2011, make it a priority to engage with business users more frequently and more meaningfully. That will build user confidence that you and your team understand the information they need, can provide it in a timely manner, and will fight to break down procedural hurdles that stand in the way of finding answers to business questions.
Taking Stock
So many individuals naturally take stock of their personal habits and reevaluate their goals at the start of a New Year that it seems like human nature to do so. New Year’s resolutions have become part of personal growth and development. BI teams can use this same process to become “better people” – more productive, more informed, contributing to strong relationships and adding more value to the business. The key is to take a step out of the weeds of daily delivery activities and think about where we are today versus where we should be and where we’re capable of taking the business. Then make your resolutions around your highest priorities and highest-potential areas for growth!
From all of us at Balanced Insight, here’s to a great 2011 for you and your BI team.
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I ardently believe that generating value to the business through effective data utilization and management is the primary purpose of my work efforts. If you’re not creating value, why bother? To that end, all three of these resolutions stick to this theme (and speak to my heart) by improving the value of the BI team to the business community that they serve.
However, I’d like to add another resolution to this list, if I may. It fits somewhere between resolutions 1 and 2, and may even be implied in #1. Here goes.
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BI New Year’s Resolution #4 (or 1.5): Determine the needs of the business BEFORE proposing a solution.
I understand that it can be difficult to get the user community to tell you what they need, but it’s not impossible. Resolution #2 indicates that a requirements backlog already exists, so the team has done some form of analysis to build those requirements prior to implementing #2. What form did that analysis take? User stories perhaps? These are a very effective way to get this done with a minimal amount of fuss. When coupled with the rapid prototyping suggested in #2, it works exceedingly well to create an agile BI environment, one that the users will greatly appreciate.
I bring this up because I have experienced several times where someone says, “We’re gonna build a cube”, or “Let’s build a data warehouse” without having any idea what type of reporting/analytics is really required by the business. Too many IT groups use an “If we build it, they will come” mentality, while at the same time saying something like, “the users don’t know what they want until we show them something.” It’s very easy to fall into this trap, but don’t do it. Through effective facilitation and analysis techniques, you can build up a good-sized backlog fairly quickly. With this in hand, you are then informed enough to start suggesting candidate solutions, such as a Performance Dashboard or alert/event processing (things that they were really looking for but didn’t know what to ask for).
Keep in mind, in most cases, the business community couldn’t care less about whether you create a data warehouse or a cube to support their BI needs. They just want their data to be easy to access, use, and navigate, and they want it in a big hurry. If you can satisfy their requirements with a simpler solution (like something as basic as a denormalized set of views over a copy of the existing transactional database), then you are definately adding value because the business quickly gains the ability to make decisions, and it didn’t take hardly any time at all to implement from the IT side. Yes, denormalized views aren’t nearly as sexy as building a data warehouse or a cube, but by adding value to the business in a short amount of time, you may actually find that you still have a job this same time in 2012.
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Happy New Year!