A simple way to do an assessment of a BI initiative 16 February 2009
Posted by Magnus Carlsson in Architecture, Business Improvements.Tags: assessment, business intelligence, Data Warehouse, information quality, requirements
3 comments
One question I often get is how to look at a current BI and/or Data Warehouse initiative and find out the current state and how to find improvement areas. This is not an easy task, especially if you come from outside the organization, but this is also a great advantage, since you are unbiased and does not love the existing solutions. I like to start with an assessment, built from open questions. The people I like to meet are the sponsors, business people using the solution, architects, current project managers and the orgaization responsible for maintenance of the current solution. Review areas are:
Business and IT allignment – What ambition level should the data warehouse adress? Are the analytical needs known and/or met? Are the users happy? Is actual usage measured, is the warehouse used? Can the warehouse react to changes?
Architecure – Are requirements on the architecure well known? Is the architecure well communicated and understood by the people using it?
Technology Selection – Focus on the most important aspects, many assessments take too much time here. Often, most important is that end-user requirements are met, that the technology and tools fit with the rest of the system landscape and that maintenance costs are at a reasonable level. A good approach is often to standardize for the vast majority of users, but let professionals use almost any tool they like .
Information Quality – Simple sanity question – do people use and trust the information from the warehouse? Look for inconsistencies between differnt analysis involving the same information. A good idea might be to use a data profiling tool and/or a data quality mart to get a feel for the data quality and issues like duplicated data, incomplete data, validity of business rules and other issues that may be automatically detected.
Project Management – Is the project well managed? Is fora and responsibilities clear?
This is a very simplified description of a BI assessment, we will come back to this subject later.
