Gartner Business Intelligence Summit: Embed BI within business processes

Too many organizations approach BI from the bottom up, Schlegel said, focusing on data quality and creating isolated reports upon request, but lacking any unifying vision. The result is an "urban sprawl of reports" that are meaningful only to those individuals who use them.

"We also need to extend up and deliver what's called strategy-driven analytic applications," Schlegel said. "This style is much more focused on overall corporate performance management in a top-down way. We need to think more about how this information is going to be used, how we can insert some form of business intelligence into a business process to make it more actionable."

To do so, here are the five key steps that Schlegel said organizations should address:

• Business vision and sponsorship. More than just signing a check, business sponsors must share in BI successes, and failures, with IT. "The relationship between IT and the business is one of teamwork," Schlegel said. "That type of balance between the right IT and business expertise … is critical."
• Data lineage, governance and quality. This is a no-brainer, Schlegel said. "If we're going to make decisions based on this information, we've got to trust it."
• Trade-off analysis. All business decisions require trade-offs. BI systems must combine planning, reporting and analysis to help decision makers weigh the costs and benefits of their actions. Architects need to take this into account.
• New skills. Forecasting and simulating scenarios are not currently considered fundamental BI skills, Schlegel said, but they should be. And they must extend throughout an organization, which can be achieved through a BI competency center.
• Cultural change. Schlegel said executives should ask themselves, "How do we as an organization change our culture away from gut feel and common knowledge to making decisions based on empirical research?" The goal, Schlegel said, is for organizations to view BI as a resource with which to model potential decisions before taking action.

bron: http://searchdatamanagement.techtarget.com/news/article/0,289142,sid91_gci1307949,00.html?track=sy240&asrc=RSS_RSS-24_240
datum publicatie: 1/4/2008