The Business Intelligence Scorecard
Business Intelligence [BI] Scorecard is a tool to aid the evolution
along the BI Maturity Lifecycle and increase the strategic business
value of the BI Program. A BI Scorecard is used to track an organizations
business intelligence and data warehouse deployments map against
BI best practise.
Scorecards have long been used by organizations as a means of implementing
strategy down through the enterprise and assessing progress against
holistic, enterprise-wide performance indicators [KPI's].
A Business Intelligence Scorecard works in exactly the same way.
Once BI
Opportunties have been defined and BI
Roadmap developed, the scorecard provides tracking against both
the roadmap and the BI Maturity Lifecycle.
The BI Scorecard acts as a reality check on whether your BI projects
are on track, and if not, how to get them back on track. It acts
as a visual connector between the BI Strategy
and the BI Program
The BI Scorecard is unique for a particular company based on its
own set of:
Keeping BI Programs on Track
The BI Scorecard helps identify root cause problems in your BI
program, clear roadblocks, and regain forward momentum to the next
level of BI and data warehouse excellence.
BI Challenges
BI challenges are not insignificant, nor are they insurmountable.
Some challenges are corporate wide, whilst others are isolated to
the functional area relating to the current BI project iteration.
Typical BI Challenges include:
Enterprise
- Political - Sharing data among business functions and across
BI applications
- Cultural - Building the BI organization
- Financial - Determining value received from the BI investment
Functional / Operational
- Responding to new business requirements
- Resolving system performance issues
- Defining repeatable development processes
- Achieving user adoption and satisfaction
Project
- Issues - multiple problems perceived, with no clear path to
resolution
- Fulfilling the promise - ensuring all business requirements
are realized with each new project iteration.
- Alignment - bridging the gap between the existing IT infrastructure
and strategic objectives.
- Value perception - ensuring BI systems developed drive value.
- Scope creep - incorporate new business requirements into the
BI development framework
BI Program
- Funding - justify and obtain new or additional funding
- Stakeholder confidence - address business stakeholders’
dissatisfaction with existing BI capabilities.
- Resource - understand and resolve gaps in skill sets and organizational
structures.
Key Scorecard Guidelines
- Performance - Resolve system performance, scalability,
or capacity issues
- Technology Selection - evaluate proposed technology
upgrades or replacements
- Extensibility - expand the depth and breadth
of current toolsets
- Data Integrity - reduce data acquisition and
replication across applications and systems, and reuse data across
a variety of enterprise functions.
- Data Management - establish formal processes
around data and metadata management
- Governance - implement BI and data governance
processes.
Developing A BI Scorecard
A BI scorecard represents a 'current state' assessment upon which
step-by-step improvement tactics are added. It is a living document
that is continuoulsy updated.
A typcial BI Scorecard includes seven categories and sub-categories
– each with its own metrics, interview questions, and scoring
procedures.
Key Scorecard Categories
- Organizational Roles and Responsibilities
- Requirements Gathering
- Data Management
- Database Platform and Architecture
- ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load)
- Production Management and Support
- Project Management
The BI Scorecard visually displays these categories, along with
their scores and rankings. This is appended by a detailed description
of the organizations current state for each ranking.
Corporate Scorecard
The Value of BI Scorecard
BI Scorecard does more than just grade current practices; it also
recommends distinct tactical plans to drive improvement in each
category. This greatly facilitiates collaboration and understanding
of the BI Program within the organization, and motivates it to take
the next steps forward.
Apart from being a program management tool, the BI Scorecard acts
to facilitate alignment between IT and the business, around BI issues,
opportunities, and action plans. This alignment helps build bridges
between these two 'entities' which generally have long past histories
of disparity.
This can transcend into distinct benefits for the BI Program,
such as:
- Renewed management attention on data warehousing and BI as
bona-fide business initiatives.
- Additional funding for recommended improvements.
- Willingness to invest in previously questioned projects, such
as metadata management.
- Cost savings from application or platform integration.
- Revenue growth from new capabilities that support business
organizations like marketing and sales.
- Job roles better aligned to actual work activities.
- Organizational re-alignment, often in support of the Center
of Excellence model.
- Helps business stakeholders and IT executives with both the
issues and opportunities around BI.
- Provides a platform for making investment decisions for significant
improvement; accelerating the organization forward to the next
level of BI excellence.
Scorecard creates a holistic picture of your BI and data warehouse
environment then zeros in on common problem areas. This allows us
to analyze the issues, make connections, draw relationships, and
isolate root causes of the real problems.
Next: How BI Solutions Work With
ERP Systems
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