Your quick guide to creating a business intelligence culture within your organisation:

[Former Member]

• Align your BI Strategy to your Business Strategy –  use BI as an enabler to change.
• Design your BI Strategy around ‘logical’ business models, not constrained by your existing systems. This will better meet your strategic drivers and enable source systems to be changed with less impact on Management Information. (Plug & Play Operational systems).
• Perform top down, ‘blue sky’, business analysis alongside bottom up data analysis – where the two easily map, will provide quick wins. Gaps will indicate future system enhancements or new data capture requirements.
• Define KPI’s that are affected by operational activities. This will allow operational staff to get direct feedback, allowing low level activities to align with the high level strategy. (Drill down from top to bottom).
• Correlate ‘lead’ indicators with ‘lag’ indicators to predict and manage future performance. Big Data now gives us more customer insight and more accurate predictive capability.
• Establish an organisational structure that can deploy BI into the business, use it for change management and then measure the impact. (BI Culture via a BI Competency Centre (BICC)).
• Use the BI initiative to form a cross organisational ‘committee’ to better integrate different areas of the business and provide cross functional insight into your organisation’s performance. This group should also oversee Master Data Management, Data Governance and Meta Data Management (BICC).
• Define the long term BI Roadmap but accept that short term tactical solutions may be necessary. Ensure any short term deployments are managed within the longer term strategy (bigger picture).
• Implement and manage BI as a continual programme and not a single project.
• Use multi skilled, self-organising SWAT teams, working together to deliver the solution.
• Adopt an Agile development methodology to provide iterative solutions on a continual basis. This will pro-actively engage IT and the Business together, enabling them to cope with change and provide quicker results. Avoid the ‘waterfall’ development methodology for BI, which requires the final solution to be defined in detail before development – BI projects always evolve during development – cater for this evolution.
• Use BI to validate your data and then implement Data Quality initiatives to resolve any issues. Make this a business led function, not an IT exercise – stop the dirty data at source, don’t continually clean it!
• Do not compromise on quality, if necessary manage the scope instead.

If this is of interest you should join us for our next Business Intelligence Centre of Excellence Event, click here for more information: www.it-performs.com/events