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Summary

The business intelligence arena is one of the fastest growing technologies in the IT realm. However, it is a unique enough arena to have its own attributes that contribute to success. Most application development goals center upon functionality of the application, such as creating customer records or recording payments made. BI applications must not only provide functionality, but also provide tools and information to allow each organization to become more competitive, retain a higher net income and provide a heightened customer focus.

Basic Methodologies

The success of a BI program depends upon several different attributes. Certainly, proven IT methodologies, such as SDLC, project management, and analysis are key drivers of success.

Two attributes make BI a little different. BI projects must be data-driven. Not just movement and storage of data, but a complete understanding of what the data means, the business processes that drive data entry and the way source systems store the data. This means that IT groups involved in data warehousing must be business focused. The second attribute is the ability to link tactical, day-to-day usage of the main systems of each organization to the strategic goals and visions. In the BI arena, it is not enough to just report what is happening today, it must be the right data delivered to the right person at the right time to make the right decisions to meet goals that are set 5-10 years out from today.

In terms of implementation, the back-end system and front-end tool selection is critical. The back-end systems should store data with well defined-business rules in a manner that's easy to extract. This is usually done in a fact-dimension layout as in data marts. Since the business rules are applied during the ETL process, adhoc reporting is much easier to roll-out to business analysts. These business analysts would use the corporate pre-definition of metrics, such as: definitions of customers, prospects, revenue earned, accounts payable, etc. One or more front-end tools could be implemented on top of the data warehouse to provide user functionality.

The front-end tools should meet the needs of the user community. In most cases, this usually includes operational reporting, such as lists or simple sums, as well as strategic reporting, such as dashboards and trending analysis. Fortunately, many software companies have risen to the challenge of customer's demands and are meeting these needs. However, they don't all provide the same functionality. Planning and requirements are imperative to understand which tool selection is best.

Learn more about this author, Linda J Banks.
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