Bringing information value to your organization is a very difficult task. Without sufficient insight and experience, or proper planning and design, even the most disciplined teams will fail. On the other hand, if you have great insight and detailed planning but no discipline for the implementa- tion, you have just wasted your money and time because your effort is sure to fail. The message should be clear: If you are missing any of these core competencies, insight/experience or planning/design or implementation discipline, it can cripple or crater the building of a BI organization.
Does your team have sufficient insight? Is there someone on your BI team who understands the broad analytical landscape available in BI envi- ronments and the techniques and technologies necessary to implement that landscape? Is there someone on your team who can recognize the application difference between advanced, static reporting and OLAP, or the difference between ROLAP and OLAP? Does one of your team mem- bers clearly recognize the application of mining and how it might impact the warehouse or how the warehouse can support the mining efforts? Does a team member understand the value of spatial data or agent-based tech- nology? Do you have someone who appreciates the unique application of ETL tools versus message broker technology? If not, get someone. BI is much bigger than a normalized atomic layer, OLAP, star schemas, and an ODS.
Having the insight and experience to recognize BI requirements and their solutions is critical to your ability to correctly formalize user require- ments and plan and implement their solutions. If your user communities
have a difficult time describing requirements, then it is up to the ware- house team to provide that insight. But if the warehouse team cannot even recognize specific BI applications—for example, data mining—then it is no wonder that BI environments often limit themselves to being passive repositories. However, ignoring these technologies does not diminish their importance and impact on both the business intelligence capability of your organization, as well as the informational asset you plan to foster.
Planning must encompass the notion of design, and planning and design both require an individual with insight. Additionally, planning requires a warehouse team philosophy with respect for standards. For example, if your company has established a platform standard or identi- fied a particular RDBMS it wishes to standardize throughout the enter- prise, it is incumbent on the warehouse team to adhere to those standards. Too often a warehouse team espouses the need for standardization to user communities, but the team itself is unwilling to adhere to established stan- dards of other areas in the company or perhaps the parent company. Not only is this hypocritical, but it ensures the enterprise will not be able to leverage existing resources and investments. That is not to say that there do not exist situations that warrant a nonstandardized platform or tech- nology; nevertheless, warehouse efforts should jealously protect standards of the enterprise until business requirements dictate otherwise.
The third core component necessary to building a BI organization is dis- cipline. It is equally dependent on individuals and the enterprise as a whole. Project planners, sponsors, architects, and users must all appreciate the discipline necessary to build the corporate informational asset. Plan- ners must steer their project efforts so as to complement other necessary efforts in the company. For example, suppose your company is imple- menting an ERP application that has a warehouse component. Then it is the responsibility of the ERP planners to work with the enterprise ware- house team so as not to compete with or duplicate the work already under- way. It serves little purpose for the enterprise to have two competing warehouses. If possible, one should feed the other and each should play specific roles supporting the enterprise warehouse requirements.
Discipline is also an issue that must be dealt with by the entire organiza- tion, and it is typically established and mandated at the executive level. Are executives willing to adhere to an engineered approach? An approach that promises to create information content that will eventually bring value to all areas of the enterprise, but perhaps compromises current individual or departmental agendas? Remember the saying, “The whole is more
important than the one.” That saying is true for BI organizations. Unfortu- nately, many warehouse efforts focus on addressing and bringing value to a particular department or even specific users, with little regard to the overall organization. The rogue executive who has his or her own agenda, business objectives, and budget is a perfect example of this problem. Sup- pose the executive requests assistance from the warehouse team. The team responds with a 90-day effort that includes not only delivering the report- ing requirements defined by the executive but ensures that all sourced data is blended into the atomic layer before being fed into the proposed cube technology. This added engineering ensures that the enterprise warehouse will grow and benefit from the data necessary for this executive. However, the executive has been talking with outside consulting firms who have pro- posed accomplishing a similar reporting application delivered in less than 4 weeks. Assuming that the internal warehouse team is a competent group, the executive has a choice. He or she can either support the extra engineer- ing discipline necessary to grow the enterprise informational asset or can choose to implement his or her own solution quickly. The latter seems to be chosen far too often and only serves to create information silos benefiting the few or the one.
LONG- AND SHORT-TERM GOALS
Architects and project planners must formalize a long-term vision of the overall architecture and plans for growing into a BI organization. And yet the
warehouse itself is evolved an iteration at a time. This combination of short- term gain and long-term planning represent the two faces of BI efforts.
Short-term gain is the facet of BI that is associated with iterations of your warehouse. It is here where planners, architects, and sponsors focus on addressing specific business requirements. It is at this level where physical structures are built, technology is purchased, and techniques are implemented. All are done in order to tackle specific requirements as defined by particular user communities.
Long-term planning, however, is the other facet of BI. It is here where plans and designs have ensured that any physical structures built, technologies selected, and techniques implemented are done so with an eye toward the enterprise. It is the long-term planning that provides the cohesion necessary to ensure that the enterprise benefits from all the subsequent short-term gains found.