Boris Evelson of Forrester Research provides interesting tips on selecting a BI services partner.
As a Business Intelligence solution provider partner, The BI Builders usually experiences better project success when our clients have done some good thinking about the provider they choose, and the long run ‘journey’ of business intelligence. ‘Journey’ is Boris’s term, and I like it so I will use it again – it’s the recognition that BI implementation is never a discrete project. Business Intelligence touches so many facets of business, and is so dynamic, that implementation becomes an art, and does not fit into the usual project execution methodology. (See The BI Builders LiqUID methodology for background).
As a Boutique BI firm, we are sometimes called in to take over a failed project and turn it around. It’s satisfying to be able to achieve a turn-around, but it’s in the clients best interest that the project never fail in the first place. For this reason, we will sometimes turn down work if we do not feel that we can make the project succeed. It is important the both sides consider the best fit of skills to the project.
Organizations should employ a mix of resourcing options so as to take advantage of the various strengths of each. For instance, an organization may decide that they are best suited to use a vendor to implement, employees for development, and a boutique provider for solution maintenance/sustainment. Here’s my take on the different Business Intelligence Consulting and Implementation options:
- Direct Hires – This may be the lowest cost option, have clear long run wins, and good integration with the business. Consider though that return on investment will be lower if you have to train the resource, or if the project evolves beyond the skill-set you’ve hired. Direct hires are likely to have a lower variety of experience.
- Independent Consultants – Independent consultants will have worked on a variety of projects, making them adaptable to new environments, and will likely be a low-cost option. There is less overhead involved (as compared with hires.) Good local consultants may be hard to find, however, and their reputation difficult to establish.
- Staff Augmentation Agencies – Staff Augmentation agencies make finding contractors easy, and have a bit more accountability in that they will likely replace a resource if he/she doesn’t work out. Cost will be higher however, and the agency doesn’t take responsibility for managing the work.
- Boutique BI – Business Intelligence firms tend to have very strong experience in specific skillsets, industries or functional areas. Implementation is likely to be fast, managed by the provider, and can involve multiple resources per project. Expect very strong knowledge/relationships for the vendors whose tools they use. Reputation may be hard to establish, however, and hourly rates will be higher than independents.
- Large Professional Services Organizations – The broad skillset companies like Deloitte and Accenture bring to Business Intelligence projects mean a highly integrated solution can be delivered, using a large project team. The project is likely to be managed by the provider, and you can feasibly outsource the whole program to them. The cost is likely to be high, however, and you may not experience the level of visibility/control in the project that you would on your own.
- Vendor Professional Services – The main advantage of working directly with the vendor for implementations is accountability. Implementation is likely to be fast, managed by the vendor and may draw on multiple resources. Cost is likely to be higher, however, than working with a boutique BI firm or an independent consultant.
Iain Rogers
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
Oracle released their latest Business Intelligence platform a few days ago. To me the most interesting parts of the offering, in terms of raising the bar for BI solutions are:
- Insight driven actions – makes it easier for users to take action based on information. I can picture a user drilling down into reports, seeing a potential issue with number of service calls at a particular customer and clicking a button to get an account service manager to call in. Or clicking a button to deny further credit to a customer who has missed payments.
- My opinion: Cool, but what if the process changes? Also, I can see this would be only marginally quicker than switching windows to the CRM and making the change there. Am I missing something?
- Business Process Optimization – BIEE integrates with Oracle BEPL Process Manager. I’m not really familiar with this piece, but I gather one use case example is: the solution can notice a large order coming in, notify the account rep and check inventory. If you set it up right.
- Anyone have insight as to how BIEE adds value to the BEPL Process Manager? i.e. can the BEPL Process Manager not do this on its own?
Links:
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
Our Business Intelligence solutions for Healthcare got some media attention recently! The BI Builders are working with EMBI – domain experts in Emergency Department analytics, metrics, dashboards and reporting – to offer a pre-built solution kit for Emergency Departments to better track their performance, meet government mandates, and improve patient care.
The news article contains an interview with Jeff A. Finkelstein, MD, chief of emergency medicine at the Hospital of Central Connecticut. The interview was conducted at the HIMSS Virtual Conference 2010. Some comments by Finkelstein:
“BI gave me back the time to do my real job, which is to lead a department and to take care of patients,”
“[The system] has basically paid for itself in improved operations and improved revenue,” he said. “The value has been enormous for the money I paid for the BI. The return on both my time and the ability to improve my department has paid off many, many times over.”
High praise from a happy customer!
Canadian customers will note that the metrics required for emergency departments in Connecticut are different than those required at home. Check our the sample solution for Emergency Medicine Business Intelligence that has been completely retooled for Canadian use.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
Boris Evelson pointed to IBM’s acquisition of Coremetrics, a web-analytics vendor, here. A commenter added that SAP has had web-analytics integration for some time.
Boris is quick to point out that integration of web-analytics into any vendor’s business intelligence stack is bound to be a great competitive differentiator. I’m not quite sure I agree. The best Business Intelligence and data warehousing solutions should be flexible enough to pull information in from any data source. Indeed, they often allow you to use pre-built content add-ons and ETL routines to connect to common data sources like ERP, CRM, manufacturing systems, logistics, and so on, ad infinitum, etc.. Adding web-analytics seems to be a drop in the bucket.
The question is what do you want to achieve with your BI solution. If the contribution of your company’s web-presence is important to the need for BI, then web-analytics will be important.
It can be important to tie web metrics to other information, top-line and bottom-line results. Can you identify how much of your sales revenue came in through your website, web-sales contribution to bad debt, and employee use of social media vs achievement of targets. If it’s not important to you to answer these questions, then a web-analytics point solution can stand alone to give you information about impressions, clicks, etc. If it is important to answer these questions, then you can either tie the output of a web-analytics package into your data, or you can grab data directly from web services. Either way, there’s work to do.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
“better decision-making through more data is ludicrous” — someone actually wrote this: here.
The author criticized IBM’s Business Intelligence maturity model, suggesting that it was a ploy to get people to buy more IBM hardware and software. He further argued technology traps executives into making poor assumptions and decisions.
Well there’s one kind of extremism and then there’s another. I agree that data without context is inappropriate, but lack of data, or incomplete data surely leads to poor decisions.
Many businesses have found competitive advantage through organizational alignment around data, and the flow of information from stores through the organization and to suppliers. Nestle, Walmart, Nike, McDonalds, the list goes on. Would the CEO of Walmart be able to manage his multi-billion dollar organization solely through anecdotal reports from Joe store clerk?
Properly designed information systems take the technology provided by vendors like IBM, SAP, Microsoft, etc., and use it as a platform for sharing information. Note that I distinguish between information and data. Corporate transactional data is an important part of information, and the story doesn’t stop at a canned report. The report (or executive dashboard) should serve to highlight the potential for a problem, and provide a route to more detailed information (including contextual information) about the problem, while exploring and asking questions.
Like it or not, the business world revolves around numbers. And businesses, rightly, set targets around the numbers they want to achieve. Without data, businesses would be unable to measure performance against targets, judge success of strategies, and implement corrective action.
Its the Business Intelligence processes, technology and staff that collect data from various parts of the organization, make sense of it, and present it to those who make decisions. Hopefully they can automate most of the process to make it more efficient – and yes, they probably have to buy software/hardware to do so, but at least they relieve hundreds or thousands of employees from crunching numbers in Excel, and let them get on with their real jobs.
The promise for Business Intelligence is a huge competitive advantage but it’s hard to achieve without the proper approach. Companies that fail in their BI efforts often do so because they (a) lack definition about what they need to measure, (b) fail to define the business case for each BI project – i.e. “improving inventory visibility will save $X in labour, and improve order fulfillment times by Y%, earning the company an ROI of AAA”, (c) implement disjointed point solutions that fail to improve information flow between departments or (d) have an inadequate overall strategy for BI
-IainR
I just came across something really cool. It’s a ‘game’ about micro-finance. It looks like Opportunity International has opened up their data to an Explorer application, and they’ve made a quiz game about it.
Go to: http://microfinance.sap.com
Microfinance is the concept of lending small amounts of money (small to us) to aspiring entrepreneurs in the developing world. The recipients don’t want hand-outs, but their areas lack financial infrastructure. The financiers (regular people like you and me) benefit from an ROI, but also from doing some good in the developing world.
Aside from being good exposure to microfinance, the game shows the power of SAP BusinessObjects Explorer – a new tool that’s bound to make BI ever more pervasive. In this quiz game, which takes less than 5 minutes, you can answer 5 detailed questions using a large and complex data-set. I can imagine this would take hours with Excel … even if I had a Data Analyst on the phone.
Check it out!
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
A recent report by the Aberdeen Research Group examined what top performing mid-market companies are doing differently. Their focus was on performance management. Top performing companies achieve:
- 89% forecast-to-plan ratio
- 93% customer satisfaction rate
- 35% yoy revenue increase
Steps to success
Aberdeen found that the top performing organizations had well developed practices around performance management. Laggards were missing out on a few key points. Aberdeen’s findings indicate that organizations should:
- Develop meaningful definitions for Key Performance Indicators to drive achievement, and provide a central location for them to be shared.
- Work with both high-level and low-level KPI. It’s an important part of performance culture, and the lower levels will roll up to the high-level KPI.
- Establish a role-based incentive program tied to performance achievement, measured by KPI.
The full report is available on Aberdeen’s website (registration required). Obviously this all means that KPI should be a focus.
Defining KPI
KPI should be tied to strategic objectives, but they should not be handed down from on high already set in stone. Teams should work with managers and executives to define KPI, and they should follow a process of constant refinement. I think it’s important to distinguish between leading and lagging indicators as well.
For instance – I was once part of an initiative to reduce the length of our sales cycle through marketing. We had information on ‘time in pipe’ and on ‘time to close’ to measure our success. ‘Time in pipe’ would be considered a lagging indicator – nothing that we do today will affect how long something has been in the sales pipeline already. If we only track this, we have to wait for a year (or some multiple of the average sales cycle length) to find out if our efforts have had success, and we will have a very accurate picture. Time to close, on the other hand, is a leading indicator. If we do something really well, then ideally, sales representatives will begin to reduce the estimated time it takes to close a sale. It is predictive of the length of sales cycle, and therefore not 100% accurate.
Both leading and lagging indicators have their merits, so teams, managers and executives should consider their KPI definition carefully.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
TDWI is hosting a timely webcast on how to implement BI in the face of the budget constraints that many organizations are facing. I think it is especially relevant to small and mid-sized companies. Unfortunately you have to wait until July to attend the webinar. Here’s the link:
http://tdwi.org/webcasts/2010/07/bi-on-a-limited-or-shrinking-budget-strategies-for-doing-more-with-less.aspx
In the meantime, here are my ideas for how to do it:
- Look for low priced alternatives to the big powerhouse BI solutions. Many of the big vendors offer a full featured solution designed for smaller companies, at a reasonable price.
- Demonstrate ROI. Start with a smaller project with clearly defined scope. If you work on solving a department’s mission critical problem, their budget will contribute. By diligently building the business case and demonstrating ROI, you’ll be able to proceed.
- Outsource maintenance. It’s hard to keep the core competency in house, and you really want your team to spend their time delivering value, not maintaining a solution. Find a contractor for BI remote management services – applying updates, supporting end users, and liaising with the vendor. This way it costs you only a few hours per month, and no employee overhead.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
In my post about Data Integration I came to a suitable understanding of the complete meaning of Data Integration, beyond ETL. But I felt I would be remiss if I did not mention Meta-Data and Abstraction.
Meta-data
Simply put, Meta-data is information about the data. It’s essential to have this when you claim that your Marketing campaign resulted in 200% increase in sales in a particular region, and your boss says “Where the heck did that number come from?!”. Your meta-data will show that it’s based on sales revenue numbers, and based on a 4 week moving average.
Abstraction
Put an extra layer between the user and the data. You may have heard of ‘Universes’ and ‘Cubes’ that use this concept. But isn’t this just another level of complexity? Why bother?
- So the data makes sense to the user
- So you can change a data source without breaking anything
Imagine that you are putting together a new bicycle. Would the instructions read “mount part#9889yd on #u9898c with #2929″? I hope not! Any responsible manufacturer would instead write “mount the front wheel on the front forks with the wrench provided.” The customer doesn’t have to search for parts, and the manufacturer doesn’t have to re-print instructions if they change wheel suppliers.
It’s the same with Business Intelligence. Users and analysts who write reports want information that has meaning. Its important for trust, and for audit-ability. Also, meta-data speeds up report development, since you always know what you’re working with. If you don’t have what you need, you can easily track back to the same source data and make new calculations. At the same time technology owners don’t want to have to worry about breaking all those reports if they change the underlying systems. If they do change a system, they simply have to rebuild the connection to the abstraction, and not to the 1000’s of reports that are built from it.
Meta-Data and Abstraction are key to successful Data Integration. The major vendors know this, and include tools for managing these concepts when they talk about their DI offerings. For instance SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator uses both.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
My colleague, Ariel, recently wrote a post about tips for creating SAP BusinessObjects Data Integrator jobs. As the name suggests this is a tool for Data Integration (DI), so his article inspired me to learn more about DI. As a marketing person, my knowledge is not deep, but I know that Data Integration is an important part of business intelligence and data warehousing, and I know that it’s about aligning data from multiple sources. Beyond that, my understanding was flawed.
Data Integration is not ETL
I thought that Data Integration meant ETL, and was therefore confined to Data Warehousing. The difference between ETL and DI, as it turns out, is important. I started with two articles I can highly recommend:
A Broader Definition Of DI
Both articles lead me to expand my understanding of Data Integration beyond ETL. We’ll start with my explanation of ETL:
- ETL stands for Extract Transform Load. It’s the process of taking information from each data source, doing some calculations (like summing sales figures for instance) and preparation (like rejecting bad data), and loading it into a data warehouse — a central location where it’s fast and easy for user to find answers.
Another two ways to use Data Integration:
- There are some situations where a data warehouse is not the best way to go. You can still give users the answers they need by pulling data together on the fly whenever someone needs information. Importantly, you have to define a schema for how the data relates to each-other, and also define what the data means to the user. This is also data integration. Strickland refers to Networked Databases here — and there are a couple of different approaches.
- A theme underlying Russom’s article points towards a third type of Data Integration: Operational DI. Where traditional DI is concerned with summarizing data to present to a user for analysis, Operational DI is not. If I understand it correctly, Operational DI is concerned with moving and exchanging data between operational systems. For instance: making sure that the customer data in the CRM is the same as the customer data in the billing system, or synchronizing the marketing database in Canada and the USA.
Next week I will write about two related concepts — meta data and abstraction. While not required for a definition of Data Integration, they should be a required accompaniment to a real-world implementation of DI.
-IainR
Sr. Marketing Manager – The BI Builders
