SelectionPath

Technology Selection

The technology products available today offer tremendous power and flexibility for creating world-class BI/DW environments that can deliver a variety of business information and analytical capabilities to support fact-based decision-making. Through skillful selection and integration of appropriate products, the BI team can lay a solid foundation for the future success of the BI initiatives. The price tags for BI/DW products can be high, however, and thus the stakes can be high for the individuals making the selection decisions. To overcome the risk of making a less than effective choice, DecisionPath has developed a systematic process that leverages multi-factor decision-making techniques and in-depth product marked analysis to help your company make the most appropriate decisions for your current and future BI/DW requirements. We have used this process, which we call SelectionPath, to help major organizations in a variety of industries select the ETL tools, data profiling tools, and query and reporting tools that are the guts of most BI/DW operations.

In order to get started in selecting the right tool or tools for your company, we first need to understand your BI requirements. By understanding what business information and analytical capabilities you intend to deploy within key business processes that drive business performance, we can help you develop and prioritize the key capabilities your organization requires from the BI/DW technology products. Because these modern products are mature and feature-rich, we can think of them as toolkits, and the key task is to decide which of the dozens of features are truly important for your BI/DW environment. To assist with this process, our SelectionPath process is built around a structured decision-making approach called the Analytic Hierarchy Process, or AHP for short. The AHP approach allows the various communities of interest in your organization to weigh in with their requirements, preferences, and priorities, and the results provide a clear delineation of organizational priorities with respect to BI/DW product features. Using the AHP results as inputs, we can then structure a sensible RFP with clear selection criteria. This is the basis for in-depth product market analysis and a focused proof of concept that tests the product features and capabilities that are most important for you specific BI/DW initiative.

All of this selection activity takes place in a specific organizational and IT context, which makes each use of SelectionPath specific to your organization. For example, some companies use relatively informal procurement processes, whereas Government agencies employ very extensive and formal processes governed by extensive regulations that have the force of law. Further, most BI/DW product selection processes occur within an IT context that often includes specific policies for acquiring new IT products and usually includes a shared services environment and an existing RDBMS. DecisionPath has operated in a range of procurement environments and we can tailor the use of SelectionPath to your specific process and culture. This flexibility allows your organization to benefit from the risk reduction capabilities of SelectionPath while still operating according to established procurement and IT policies and procedures.

Once the product selection or selections have been made, and after the vendor has left, there are often challenges associated with fully leveraging the new products in the BI/DW environment. For example, in large organizations with multiple BI development teams, it may be advisable to create an ETL Center of Excellence and/or a Query and Reporting Center of Excellence to capture the productivity gains such tools provide and to ensure that standards and best practices are leveraged across development efforts. While this might seem to be straightforward, we have found that large IT shops find it very useful to bring consistent attention to how to best capitalize on the power of the BI/DW products. Accordingly, DecisionPath stands ready to help your company ensure the success of the products in use.