Architectures

In order to ensure that your organization’s investment in BI and DW pay off, there needs to be orderly relationships between business strategy, key business processes that drive performance, and the type of business information and analytical applications that your BI/DW initiative will deliver. These orderly relationships can be expressed as architectures – the systematic alignment of organizational components to ensure that the sum is greater than the parts.

Achieving and maintaining this alignment is complex and multi-faceted, and yet it is essential for the success of the BI/DW initiative. That being said, our BI Pathway Method provides a cost-effective way to assess the degree of alignment, point out improvement opportunities, and define or refine the BI/DW Architecture. This creates an effective roadmap for designing and building appropriate data structures to deliver the business information and analytical applications your organization needs to support fact-based decision-making and drive performance. To ensure that your investment in BI is building capabilities that create incremental profit, we systematically look at the following:

• the Business Strategic Context, which consists of environmental drivers and a company’s business and IT strategies in response to environmental drivers;
• the Business Architecture, which is the arrangement of business processes, organizational structure, people, technologies, and systems used to serve a company’s customers;
• the BI Scope – whether the architecture is being designed and aligned at the enterprise level, an SBU level, a functional level, a departmental level, or for a single BI initiative;
• the BI Types – defining the range of BI applications that are envisioned to support different types of user needs;.
• the BI Architectural Contexts – any BI initiative must take place within a context defined by: (1) existing ways of managing IT projects; (2) existing arrangements of data stores, data flows, and data management approaches; (3) existing IT tools, platforms, solutions, and products; and (4) existing IT operating policies;
• the BI Architecture, which defines the relationship between business information, business analyses, and business decisions and the targeted core management, revenue-generating, and/or operational processes that will use the BI to improve performance;
• the state of BI Readiness, which identifies the business and technical risks that a company faces and focuses on mitigating and managing those risks;
• the BI Opportunity Portfolio - the set of business-driven BI opportunities for profit improvement;
• High-level Business Process Models, which depict current core management, revenue-generating, and/or operational processes at an appropriate level and the “to-be” process or processes that will leverage BI to improve profit; and
• BI Requirements – the specific business information, business analyses, and business decisions associated with each BI Opportunity in the BI Opportunity Portfolio.

The relationships between the architectural components described above can be analyzed, characterized, aligned, and managed to improve performance if your organization has the will to do so. One key is to convince business executives of the value of doing so, and that gets into tailoring the use of the BI Pathway. Another key is to recognize that it is not practical or advisable to over-analyze these architectural components and their relationships. There is no need to employ massive project teams to accomplish the goal of understanding and aligning the factors that drive BI success. And compared to the tens or even hundreds of millions that companies have spent on enterprise IT “solutions” to generate transactional data, the money spent to align these architectural factors is a drop in the bucket that helps ensure returns in the tens of millions of dollars.