The Business Intelligence Guide

A Roadmap is a visual planning model used to demonstrate the alignment of a sequential chain of business improvement projects to enterprise strategic goals and objectives.

By assigning strategic business values to each improvement opportunity, the program goals and objectives can be prioritized in terms of the enterprise business requirements.

EDW Roadmap

An Enterprise Data Warehouse [EDW] is a central repository for significant enterprise data, that expands beyond any single department or user group. It is based on the concept of “store once and use many”. The development of an EDW tends to be ongoing, through a series of iterations, to meet changing business needs.

Enterprise data warehouse roadmaps are a key improvement roadmap in terms of the quality and completeness of data loaded to the EDW.

An EDW roadmap assists the business in staying focused its strategic business values during each iteration, whilst visually connecting and communicating the needs of the business to the data of the enterprise.

Due to the sheer size of developing an EDW, the business value analysis can become very complex, and accrue to one ROI.

By using a roadmap, the impact of the change with each iteration can be modelled, to help maximize the ROI.

• Building A BIO Roadmap
• Analysis - BQ & KPI
• Telco BIO Model
• Assessment of BI Opportunities
• Logical Data Model [LDM]
• The Complete EDW Telco Model

Building a BIO Roadmap

The following high level process is used to build a Business Intelligence Opportunity [BIO] Roadmap

1. Identify and document the business vision, goals, and strategic objectives. Ensure all goals are directly linked to a strategic objective.
2. Assign a relative weight from 1 to 7 for each goal.
3. Combine the weight of all goals linked to a single strategic objective and transfer the total weighting to the objective.
4. Pass this ‘factored objective weight’ to the associated business improvement opportunity [BIO].
5. Analyse the business objective to identify the actions that should be taken.
6. Define the BIO objective - what business results will be realized when the work is completed.
7. Complete all BIO objectives to meet a strategic business objective
8. Track completion in the planning model.

Note: A single BIO may contribute to several business strategic objectives .

The four parts of a BIO are:

1. Financial value - identified via a business impact model.
2. Knowledge value - of having information in the data warehouse. As the data improves, supporting higher value/lower cost actions, generating higher value return. This is also referred to as information enabled value.

Analysis: Business Questions and Key Performance Indicators

When analysing a BIO, identify business questions and metrics to be used to determine the planned success of our work. These business questions and key performance indicators are linked to the supporting BIO.

Typical Business Questions

• What are the characteristics of a profitable customer x channel?
• Who are the highest revenue customers?
• What is the most profitable channel?
• What was the cost of acquisition x customer group x channel x region x reseller?
• What is the lifetime value of each customer by ARPU?
• What is the average data usage per customer x rate plan?

Typical KPIs

• Revenue x Marketing Campaign
• ARPU – Average Revenue Per Customer Unit
• Profit Margin Per Customer x Service/Product

These BQ’s and KPI’s are related to the supporting data in the Logical Data Model [LDM]. Unless all of the needed attributes are sourced, the BQ or KPI is not valid. Therefore, the BQ or KPI is not considered as information unless 100% of the needed attributes are available. Throughout a program of work, or a series of project iterations, the validity status of BQ's and KPI's change. It is important that this change in status is tracked. A simple means is using a grid identifying all BQs andKPIs, each square highlighted using a color to identify the value of having the information in the data warehouse, for instance: Red (0-49%) Yellow (50-74%), Yellow green (75-99%), Dark green (100%)

As the data sources are enriched, EDW information improves, supporting higher value/lower cost actions, generating higher value return. This is referred to as information enabled value.

Typical Telco BI Opportunity Roadmap

The following BIO Roadmap is based on the Communications Model developed by Teradata.

BI Opportunity Assessment

Each opportunity is assessed based on a defined framework of questions, with key KPI's established to measure any improvement in the area.

For each BI Opportunity objective, key outcomes are established:

• Results
• Actions
• Analysis

From the business answers to the questions and the data required for KPI reporting, a data set requirement can be defined. This forms the basis of the underlying Logical Data Model for that opportunity.

Data sources are then defined to provide all the data elements required for the LDM.

Logical Data Model

The Teradata Communications industry LDM supplies attributes to the business questions and analyses. The LDM is structured from the business perspective as a set of subject areas.

Within each subject area are supporting entities.

Further decomposition of the entity exposes the attributes that the IT staff will need to associate with the physical data model and the related operational systems that will supply the data.

Typical Telco Data Sources

High-level enterprise goals and objectives > Associated BIOs business questions > key performance Indicators > specific data attributes needed to enable them.

The Complete Model

If the model was approached from the bottom up we would identify:

1. What data are readily available from the enterprise operational support systems
2. What actionable information can be created.
3. Which business questions and key performance indicators might be available, based on sourced data.

Adpated From Teradata BIO

These are not always available due to scope and ROI of the BI Project. However, an integrated data model leverages each BI project for exponential return. Progress along the roadmap incrementally sources and loads operational data into the EDW data model.

The sequence of the roadmap iterations is based on a specific project ROI and the additional data source requirements. By aligning and managing the order of data sourcing to its value to the enterprise, the roadmap is built. The roadmap is a live entity and must be flexible to support changing priorities of the business.

The business return is exponential, as a critical mass of integrated data evolves, and more users are able to leverage the value of the EDW.

Next: Teradata BI Solutions For Telcos

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