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Successful

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
Secrets to Making BI a Killer App

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DOI: 10
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For Norman

About the Author
Cindi Howson is the founder of BIScorecard®, a resource for in-depth
BI product reviews, and has 15 years of BI and management reporting
experience
...
Prior to founding BIScorecard, Cindi
was a manager at Deloitte & Touche and a BI standards leader for a
Fortune 500 company
...
Contact
Cindi at cindihowson@biscorecard
...


About the Technical Editor
Elizabeth Newbould is the director of business intelligence at Dataspace,
Incorporated (www
...
com), one of the United States’ foremost
data warehousing consultancies
...
Her e-mail address is enewbould@dataspace
...


Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


For more information about this title, click here

Contents
Preface
Acknowledgments

1
...


Techno Babble: Components of
a Business Intelligence Architecture
Operational and Source Systems
Data Transfer: From Operational to Data Warehouse
The Data Warehouse
Data Warehouse Tables
The Data Warehouse Technology Platform
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

3
...


Measures of Success
Success and Business Impact
How to Measure Success
Return on Investment
Number of Users

viii
xi

1
1
2
7
13
13
20

21
22
25
28
30
33
34

35
35
39
40
44
45
46
48
50
51
51

53
53
58
59
61
v

vi

Contents

Other Measures of Success
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

5
...


Executive Support
Executive Support and Success
Which Executive Is the Best Sponsor?
Getting Executive Buy-In
The Role of an Executive Sponsor
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

7
...


D Is for Data

99
106
107
110
112
114

The Business-IT Partnership
Voices of Frustration
The Business-IT Yin-Yang
Meet the Hybrid Business-IT Person
How to Be a Better Partner
Alignment
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

9
...


Agile Development
Waterfall Development Process
Agile Development Techniques
Sharper BI at 1-800 Contacts
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

11
...
Department BI
The BI Steering Committee
Business Intelligence Competency Centers (BICC)
BICC Guiding Principles
BI Shake-Up at Corporate Express
BI Team Leaders as Level 5 Leaders
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

12
...


Other Secrets to Success
The Role of Culture
Promoting Your BI Capabilities
Training
A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Numbers
Best Practices for Successful Business Intelligence

14
...
Despite its priority, businesspeople routinely complain about
information overload on the one hand and the inability to get to relevant
data on the other
...
As a technology, BI usage remains modest, with significant untapped potential
...
After I spoke
at a business intelligence and performance management user conference,
an IT person stopped me to say how inspired he was, that he felt motivated
to talk more to the business users and less intimidated by them
...
And yet, I had forgotten how big a problem the IT-business
disconnect can be, particularly for BI, which lies at the crossroads
between business and technology
...
In my spare time, I am not normally a reader of business
books, but I had heard Collins at another user conference and was curious
...
At the same time that I was judging the
TDWI Best Practices awards—offering me previews of some who have
encountered wild success—I was working with a company who couldn’t
get their BI initiative off the ground
...
The information
technology (IT) department was creating customized, inflexible reports
directly in the source systems
...
These moments led to an article I wrote last summer for Intelligent
Enterprise, “The Seven Pillars of BI Success
...
Click here for terms of use
...

My hope for this book, then, is that it is a resource for both business
users and the technical experts that implement BI solutions
...
The customer stories in this book are meant as much to
inspire as to offer valuable lessons on both the successes and the pitfalls
to avoid
...

When BI is left only for the IT experts to champion, it can provide only
limited value
...


About Product References
Customers in this book and throughout the industry use a variety of
products and technologies in their business intelligence deployments
...
Such references
are not meant to be an exhaustive list of all the products available on the
market place or an endorsement of specific solutions
...
This book is not a technical reference on how to
architect a solution or implement the software
...

Chapter 1 defines business intelligence, its history, the business
and technical drivers, and the approach to researching this book
...
Chapters 4–13 describe the factors that most contribute to
a company’s successful use of BI from both a technical and organizational perspective
...
If you are looking to understand
ways BI can help your business, Chapter 1, “Business Intelligence from
the Business Side,” Chapter 5, “The LOFT Effect,” and Chapter 9,
“Relevance,” should be on your must-read list
...
In particular, thank you to Matt Schwartz, Jonathan Rothman,
Anne Marie Reynolds, Jim Hill, Jeff Kennedy, Dag Vidar Olsen, and Rob
Vallentine, who also spearheaded the efforts at each of their companies to
allow me to talk to the right people
...

Survey data helped support trends and insights, so I thank everyone
who participated in the survey and those who helped promote the survey, in particular Doug Henschen at Intelligent Enterprise, Ron Powell
at the Business Intelligence Network, and Dave Wells and Steve Cissell
at TDWI
...
Thank you to Rosemary LaCoste for juggling so
many hats, helping me narrow the list of case studies, and researching
all my obscure questions
...
Thank you as well to Stephen Few
for weaning me off my use of pie charts and encouraging me to use
advanced visualization software to better analyze the survey
...


xi
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


xii

Acknowledgments

The journey from concept to book is a long one
...
Thank you to David Stodder for helping me craft
a glimpse of what would become this book
...
It was
truly a commitment, and I thank her for helping make this book better
than I could do on my own! Thank you to my editor, Lisa McClain, for
believing in this project when I faltered, to Mandy Canales for keeping
all the pieces moving along, Samik Roy Chowdhury and Jody McKenzie
for making a finished product, and to Karen Schopp for making sure it
reaches more readers! Thank you to Stephen Space, designer extraordinaire, for transforming my stick figures into beautiful artwork and
clearer concepts
...

I’m indebted to my friends Jack and Teresa, who kept me from pulling my hair out (almost) and helped me find the LOFT effect
...
Thank you, Megan and Sam, for reminding
me that, in order to tell people’s stories and inspire others, you have to
laugh along the way
...
It reveals the performance,
operational efficiencies, and untapped opportunities
...
Without people to interpret the information and act on it, business intelligence
achieves nothing
...
Technology enables business intelligence, but sometimes, too great a focus on technology can sabotage
business intelligence initiatives
...


Business Intelligence by Other Names
Business intelligence means different things to different people
...
” To another person, “reporting”
may be a better term, even though business intelligence goes well beyond
accessing a static report
...
Others will use terms such as
“business analytics” or “decision support,” both with varying degrees of
appropriateness
...
What matters most is
to use the terminology that is most familiar to intended users and that

1
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


2

Chapter 1

has a positive connotation
...


What Business Intelligence Is Not
A data warehouse may or may not be a component of your business
intelligence architecture (see Chapter 2), but a data warehouse is not
synonymous with business intelligence
...


BI
The acronym for business intelligence is BI, and as information technology (IT) people like to use a plethora of acronyms, BI is one more
that can sometimes cause confusion
...
Even within the BI industry, confusion
abounds as some people use BI to refer to the whole technical architecture (including the data warehouse, described in Chapter 2) as well
as the user front-end tools (described in Chapter 3)
...


How Business Intelligence
Provides Business Value
Business intelligence cuts across all functions and all industries
...

As stated earlier, though, business intelligence can only provide business
value when it is used effectively by people
...
1

Business Intelligence from the Business Side

3

However, having better access to data does not affect company performance2; the difference is in what companies do with the data
...
Without business intelligence, managers may talk about how they are “flying blind” with no
insight until quarterly financial numbers are published
...
In the
past, if managers monitored the business via paper-based reports, they had
no flexibility to explore why the business was operating a certain way
...
Rather than waiting until the close of the quarter to
discover that excessive expenses have reduced profitability, timely access to
expense data allows managers first to identify which business unit is over
budget and then to take immediate steps to reduce overtime pay or travel
expenses, or to defer purchases
...
Business performance is measured by a number of financial indicators such as revenue, margin, profitability, cost to serve, and
so on
...
Eliminating ineffective campaigns saves
companies millions of dollars each year
...
Accounting personnel may use BI to reduce the aging of accounts
receivable by identifying late-paying customers
...

In all these instances, accessing data is a necessary first step
...

Taking action on findings should not be assumed
...
To leverage business intelligence to improve performance, you need to consider
all these issues
...
If this data access is not leveraged for decisionmaking and acted upon, then BI has done nothing to improve business
performance
...


A key sign of successful business intelligence is the degree to which it
impacts business performance
...
How to measure business intelligence success is
discussed in Chapter 4
...
In this regard, accessing detailed
data and reviewing information may be necessary to complete a task
...
Such an inventory
report may be a standard report developed within an order entry system or it may come from a BI solution, whether stand alone or embedded in the order entry application
...

Hospitals and emergency rooms will use business intelligence to
determine optimum staffing levels during peak periods
...

Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom uses business intelligence for
its service that issues park visitors FastPass tickets to avoid standing
in long lines for rides
...


Operational business intelligence most differs from BI for management
and control purposes in both the level of detail required and in the
timeliness of the data
...
Business
intelligence for management and control purposes may also be in near
real time but can also be based on weekly or monthly data
...


BI for Process Improvement
The operations of a business are made up of dozens of individual processes
...
It also may be used to help streamline a process by measuring
how long subprocesses take and identifying areas for improvement
...
In the absence of
business intelligence, a company may only realize there is a problem when
a customer complains: “My order is late” or “I can get that product faster
from your competitor
...

■

■

At Norway Post, for example, postal workers monitor the number of
packages and letters sorted by hour
...

At an oil and gas company, cash flow was problematic
...
Reducing the time in the delivery-to-invoice process helped the company solve cash-flow problems
...


6

Chapter 1

BI to Improve Customer Service
The quality of customer service eventually manifests itself in the financials of a company
...
For example:
■

■

Whirlpool uses business intelligence to monitor its warranty program
to understand root causes for warranty problems and improve customer satisfaction with its products
...
5

BI to Make the World Better
Business intelligence for management and control and performance
improvement gets a fair amount of media attention
...

■

■

■

■

Police departments in Richmond, Virginia,6 and Humberside,
England,7 for example, have used business intelligence to help police
officers respond better to call-outs and to reduce crime rates
...
Loan amounts as low
as $50 help applicants to start their own businesses
...

School systems use business intelligence to understand the effects
and trends in student grades based on gender, attendance rates, and
teaching methods
...


BI for Discovering New Business Opportunities
Business intelligence helps businesses assess and uncover new business
opportunities by exploring data and testing theories
...

A hospitality company uses business intelligence to explore hotel
capacity rates as a way of developing the time-share business
...
Many
analysts firms and surveys cite BI as the number one or number two
IT investment priority
...
9 Its growth rate in
the past few years has been in the 11% range—impressive, considering
unit prices for many business intelligence components have dropped,
and in contrast to other information technology markets whose growth
has slowed
...
Of course, decision-making processes existed long before the
information technology to support them
...
The cost to support decisions with facts was
high and usually involved gathering data manually
...


•
•
•
•
•
•

y Forces
olog
n
ch
Te • Lower Computing Costs

Globalization
Innovation
Competition
Sarbanes-Oxley
Basel 2
Tech-Savvy Workers

Busin

e
orc
ss F
e

•
•
•
•

s

Data Explosion
Speed
Web-based BI
BI Suites

8

Chapter 1

Business Forces Driving BI
The business landscape has changed dramatically in the last 20 years
...
The wealth of information at consumers’ and businesses’
fingertips puts greater pressure on pricing and makes customer churn a
constant threat across industries
...
Companies
compete on time-to-market and product innovations at a frenetic pace
...

With the fall of Enron and numerous accounting scandals, shareholders demand still more transparency and accountability
...

Businesses can’t afford not to know what’s going on, internally and externally, and in levels of detail never before imagined or required
...

A sizeable portion of senior managers did not grow up with computers
...
Giving workers too much access to information may be viewed as
a threat to power
...
Contrast that with
elementary school children today who learn the value of data analysis early by graphing demographics and sales data in spreadsheets to
identify trends
...
Computer literacy has
become a job requirement for anyone entering the workforce
...
Recognize the role that technical and data literacy plays in the
adoption of business intelligence
...
10 Declining birthrates on the one hand, and later
retirements on the other, mean older workers are making up a larger
portion of the workforce
...
11 This means widespread use of computers happened
only after half the current workforce graduated college
...

Some studies have shown that computer usage seems consistent for
U
...
workers up until age 50, and then it drops off by 20%
...
Remember, though, that a significant portion of
the workforce doesn’t
...
The Pew Internet & American Life Project surveyed
4001 Americans about their use and attitudes toward various forms of
information technology
...
Simplifying the results, the following table
shows the percentage split among:
■
■

■

Those who use and embrace technology
Those who use technology but find it a burden and hassle
to use
Those who don’t use technology or view technology as providing little
value

Use and View
of Technology

Percentage of U
...

Population

Median Age Range

Embrace

41%

28 to 40

Hassled

10%

46

Wary

49%

46 to 64

Source: The Pew Internet & American Life Project

The difference in median age between the embracers of technology and the wary users of technology is apparent, yet not surprising
...
The
good news, though, is that as technology is easier and more relevant,
usage increases
...
Understand the employee demographics in your own company, and be sure to consider these issues
as you address BI adoption
...


Technology Changes Enabling BI
Rapid change in technology has been one driver of this frenetic pace of
business change; it also has enabled business intelligence for everyone,
not just information technology experts, programmers, and power users
...

There is one crucial aspect of extending the reach of business intelligence
that has nothing to do with technology and that is Relevance
...
Much
of business intelligence thus far has been relevant to power users and
senior managers but not to front/line workers, customers, and suppliers
...
What once was handwritten or typed onto
a piece of paper to process an order is now entered into a system with
ever more detail
...
13

Business Intelligence from the Business Side

11

analyze is projected to grow anywhere from 25% to double in the next
year
...
In the past three years, the amount of digital data
in Fortune 1000 companies has grown fivefold and in midsize companies,
50-fold
...
16
If you feel like you are drowning in information, it’s because you are
...
The proverbial needle in the
haystack may be the single insight about a customer that locks in their
loyalty
...


At the Speed of Thought It might seem that with the explosion
of data, accessing more data would get slower
...
Twenty
years ago, you might have waited a month for a complex, printed report
that ran on a mainframe computer for days
...
Today, the
same report may run in seconds on a purpose-built business intelligence
appliance and be delivered to a BlackBerry mobile device
...
With the client/
server computing of the early 1990s, it took days to install and configure
PCs for just a handful of users
...

BI Suites and Toolsets Business intelligence tools have multiple
front-end components, such as business query tools, OLAP, and dashboards (discussed in Chapter 3)
...
Previously, companies had to
buy these multiple components from separate vendors
...
As a single vendor
now offers a full suite or toolset and the components are integrated
from a usability and infrastructure point of view, business intelligence
can reach more users, based on their unique requirements and again
at a lower cost of ownership
...

Other Emerging Technologies Web 2
...
0 technologies
are bolstering BI’s prevalence and making it more actionable through
the following:
■

■

■

■

■

Integration of search with BI gives a Google-like interface to BI and
allows users to more easily find relevant information
...

Flashier web-based visualizations that both are more appealing and
offer rapid insight into trends
...

BI gadgets that are mini reports and visualizations immediately accessible without having to log into a separate BI application
...


These technologies are discussed in more detail in Chapters 3
and 14
...
Anyone with a vested
interest in preserving the status quo may not welcome a business intelligence initiative
...
One CIO described the
company’s business intelligence initiative as an emotional process to get
through but necessary to execute the business’s vision
...

Some of the BI battle scars include:
■

■

■

■

Power struggles between IT and the business when either loses areas
of control or disagrees on the scope and approach
Jobs eliminated when custom report developers were no
longer needed
A marketing manager fired when a company realized just how badly
the manager was performing campaign management
Software and technology that does not always work as expected, and
vendors who merge, get acquired, or change strategy in ways that
affect your BI deployment

The Research
As a consultant and industry analyst, I did not want my own experiences,
opinions, and customers to be the primary influence on defining the
secrets to making BI a killer application for businesses
...
The research for this book then had four main components:
a survey, in-depth case studies, a review of literature on award winners,
and a peer networking session
...
The full survey is included in Appendix A
...
The survey was promoted through multiple media
outlets including:
■

■

■

■

■

Intelligent Enterprise (www
...
com), an online
magazine and sister publication of Information Week that focuses on
business intelligence, content management, and business process
management
The Business Intelligence Network (www
...
com), a
global resource for business intelligence, data warehousing, customer
data integration (CDI), performance management, and information
quality
Strategic Path, an Australian-based print publication and website
(http://www
...
com
...
Most of the survey charts were produced using Tableau
Software
...
Others,
though, show how visualizing the data in different ways reveals previously undistinguishable patterns
...

The majority of survey responses were from the United States
(69%), followed by with Europe (12%), Canada, Latin America, Asia,
Australia and New Zealand, and South Africa (see Figure 1-3)
...
When asked to describe
their role within the company, 23% described themselves as a hybrid
business/IT person and another 10% were business users
...


The Successful BI Case Studies
Surveys are an ideal method for providing statistical information on trends
and insights for explicit questions
...
As a way of unearthing these drivers, I scanned the market for
companies consistently recognized for their business intelligence initiatives and honored by magazines, industry analysts, and software vendors
...
As a way of addressing this limitation,

Business Intelligence from the Business Side

17

Industry
Finance/Banking
Computers
Consulting
Insurance
Manufacturing
Government-Federal/State/Local
Medical/Healthcare
Consumer Products/Retail/Wholesale
Education/Training
Telecommunications
Transportation
Utilities
Publishing
Energy
Biotechnology/Biomedical
Construction
Entertainment
Non-Profit
Industrial Tech
Food & Apparel
Travel/Hospitality
Advertising/Public Relations
Military
0%

2%

4%

6%
8%
% of Survey Respondents

10%

12%

Figure 1-5 Survey demographics by industry

I looked through years of notes from industry conferences for companies
who had wowed me with their stories
...

For in-depth case studies, I pruned the list to a cross section of industries, company sizes, and BI uses
...
Throughout the book,
I refer collectively to this final group as the “Successful BI Case Studies
...
Several, in fact, purposely elect not to apply
for any industry awards for this reason
...
A few case studies

18

Chapter 1

may not be award winners, but I have included them because of their
unique stories and the profound impact BI has had on their companies
...
Having demonstrated success with internal customers,
they recently released a solution for consumers
...

Corporate Express I first heard Corporate Express speak at the
MicroStrategy World conference in 2006
...
During the course of my writing this book, they
received the TDWI Best Practices Award for Predictive Analytics
...
I began my career in business intelligence at Dow, and
while I have been privileged to work with a number of visionary customers throughout my consulting career, I continue to refer back to some
of the best practices garnered from Dow’s business intelligence project
...

Norway Post I was honored to meet Norway Post at Hyperion’s 2005
user conference
...
Just how bad it was and how far it has come serves
as a lesson that no matter how conservative a company or the industry
in which you operate, having a solid business intelligence platform and
performance management culture can lead to incredible success
...
While many companies start with BI in finance
and marketing, 1-800 CONTACTS began their BI efforts with frontline workers in their call centers
...
Yet I am one of
Continental Airlines’ most loyal customers, so I wanted to include
them to understand how they can face a resistant traveler, in a difficult industry, and still exceed customer expectations
...
The company’s turnaround from bankruptcy to profitability and best in service has been
widely written about
...
Having met their BI director at several
conferences, I find his excitement at improving patient care and getting even doctors to embrace dashboards contagious
...
In studying these
companies, I asked to speak to the usual suspects—BI program managers, sponsors, users—but in addition, I asked to speak to the skeptics
who did not believe in the value of business intelligence or who resisted
using the solution internally
...

Without the time and insights these companies willingly shared, this
book would not have been possible
...
During this session, we brainstormed
causes of and barriers to success, again using open-ended questions
...
The comments from one participant in particular helped form
the acronym in Chapter 5, the LOFT Effect
...
My hope is that this book increases this
understanding
...
For those struggling with
this issue, I think you will find Dow’s story in Chapter 7 illuminating
...

Some of these items are not secrets at all
...
The
secret then is not always in the what, but rather, in the how—how to get
executive-level sponsorship
...
Measure success in multiple ways, using objective measures when
available and recognizing the importance of benefits that cannot be
readily quantified
...
Understand the effect of Luck, Opportunity, Frustration, and
Threat (LOFT) to catapult your BI initiative from moderate success
to wild success
...
Garner executive support to ensure BI infiltrates all corners of an
organization to provide competitive advantage and business value
...
Start with a solid data foundation and add to it incrementally and
continuously to improve the quality, breadth, and timeliness of data
...
Align the BI strategy with the goals of the business by ensuring IT and
business personnel work more as partners and less as adversaries
...
Find the relevance for BI for every worker in the company, as well
as for customers and suppliers
...
Use agile development processes to deliver BI capabilities and
improvements at the pace of change commensurate with the pace
of business change
...
Organize BI teams and experts for success and building a solution
with a focus on the enterprise
...
Choose appropriate BI tools that meet the user and business needs
and that work within the technology standards that IT can effectively support
...
There are several other secrets such as fostering a culture that
encourages fact-based decision making and discourages data hoarding, promoting your successes and the applications, and presenting
data visually
...
The BI architecture is much like the engine of a car—a necessary component, often
powerful, but one that users, like drivers, don’t always understand
...
For more mature BI
deployments and particularly for enterprise customers, it will involve
ETL (extract, transform, and load) tools, a data warehouse, data marts,
BI front-end tools, and other such components
...
Most car drivers know that cars have
a battery, a transmission, a fuel tank—an adequate level of knowledge
for having a conversation with a mechanic or salesperson but arguably
not so much expertise to begin rebuilding an engine
...
If you are a technical expert, you might find
this chapter to be overly simplified and it is
...

Chapter 3 explores the sleek “chassis” of this BI architecture
...
Click here for terms of use
...
Operational systems may also be referred to as “transaction
processing systems,” “source systems,” and “enterprise resource planning” (ERP) systems
...
The quantity of raw
material used and the finished product produced are recorded
...

Supply chain system When the product is available, the product is
shipped and order fulfillment details are entered
...
The invoices and payments may be recorded in an
operational system that is different from the order entry system
...


Techno Babble: Components of a Business Intelligence Architecture

23

In each step in this process, users are creating data that can eventually be used for business intelligence
...
Perhaps in order to
accept an order, the product must be available in inventory
...


When business intelligence is integrated with an operational system or
supports an operational task, it is referred to as operational business
intelligence
...
D
...
With custom-developed operational
systems or with modules coming from different vendors, data may be
manually entered into each system
...
However, even
when data is systematically transferred, the Customer ID entered in
the order system may not, for example, be the same Customer ID
entered in the accounting system—even though both IDs refer to the
same customer!
Ideally, consistent information flows through the process seamlessly,
as shown in Figure 2-2
...
From a data perspective, ERPs
reduce duplicate data entry and thus improve data quality (see Chapter 7)
...

Within the business intelligence life cycle, the operational systems are the starting point for data you will later want to analyze
...
If the operational system contains errors, those errors will
only get compounded when you later aggregate and combine it with
other data
...


Additional Source Systems
While much of the data warehouse (described in the next section) is
populated by operational systems, data may also come from additional
data sources such as:
■
■

■

Distributors who supply sales and inventory information
Click-stream data from web logs that show the most frequently viewed
products or online shopping cart analysis for partially completed
orders
Market prices from external research firms

Whether this additional data gets loaded into a central data warehouse will depend on how consistently it can be merged with corporate
data, how common the requirement is, and politics
...
Disparate data sources may, in some
cases, also be accessed or combined within the BI front-end tool
...
To facilitate this, data will be extracted
from the operational systems and loaded into a data warehouse, as
shown in Figure 2-3
...
More
recently, some data warehouse teams have changed the order in which
they do certain things and will call it ELT (extract, load, transform)
...
Inconsistent
codes (product ID, customer ID), handling of incomplete data, changing codes to meaningful terms (1 = not shipped, 2 = shipped) are all part
of the transform process
...
More recently, as packaged ETL solutions have come on
the market and become integrated with the BI front-end, customers use
purchased ETL solutions
...

NOTE Throughout this book, I will mention specific vendor products as
a way of providing you with concrete examples
...


Why Not Extract Everything?
In designing a data warehouse, requirements analysts will ask users
what they need so that the ETL specialists can figure out what should
be extracted from the source systems
...

There are a number of reasons why all the data should not be
extracted:
■
■

■

■

High data replication and storage costs
...

Negative impact on query performance when too much detailed data
is stored in the data warehouse
...


Enterprise Information Management
As the data warehouse industry has matured and ETL tools have evolved,
this market segment is increasingly referred to as enterprise information
management (EIM)
...


Metadata IT professionals talk a lot about metadata and go to great
pains to make the business understand its importance
...

Helpful, isn’t it?
Metadata is similar to a card file in a library or book details on
Amazon
...
A card file in a library (or the book details on Amazon)
tells you which category a book belongs to, when it was published, and
so on
...
These items are also important in knowing how
timely the information you are analyzing is
...

As you move down the list, the items become much more important
to all business users
...
As more people use
BI, metadata is critical in ensuring a common business terminology and
in ensuring users really know what the data means
...
1
Master data is the code and descriptions for customer, product,
charts of accounts, regions, and so on
...
This product
ID is stored and maintained in one common place so that the relevant
operational and business intelligence systems can access and share it
...
In this case, master data will include the
mappings of the different product IDs that really are the same product
represented in different systems
...
If this all sounds a little boring and
unimportant to you, read the story of how pivotal a role master data has
played in Dow Chemical’s business intelligence success in Chapter 7
...
With some business users, “data warehouse” has become a
dirty word, associated with “expensive,” “monolithic,” and of no business value
...
In reality, they both serve similar purposes but might have different
scope and technical architecture
...
They don’t
...
But there are a number of fundamental differences between
operational systems and data warehouses, highlighted in Table 2-1
...
The technical architecture of the data warehouse may vary, but
its necessity does not
...
”

Why Bother with a Data Warehouse at All?
Many customers new to BI want to skip the data warehouse and deploy
a BI tool directly against the operational system
...


History

Current information with
very little history

Larger amounts of history allow
multiyear trend analysis, this year
versus last year comparisons
...
More recently,
operational data warehouses
may extract information in
real-time or several times
throughout the day
...


Response time

Fast inputs, but slow queries

Read-only; tuned for fast queries
...
The data
warehouse will have fewer tables
than the source systems have
...


Reporting
and analysis

Fixed reports by one detailed Fixed or ad hoc reporting and
dimension (cost center, plant, analysis by multiple dimensions
across all business functions
...
In some instances, it may
be an acceptable way to start with BI, and this approach addresses
operational BI needs
...
Such information may
exist in two different systems or different modules within an ERP
system and are thus combined into the data warehouse
...
These hierarchies often don’t exist in transaction systems, and
even when they do, running such voluminous queries within a transaction system can slow it to the point of interfering with data entry
...
Because of
their different purposes and design, data warehouses allow for faster
queries than operational systems
...

A data mart also may be used to feed a central data warehouse
...
Because a data mart is aligned with a particular business
requirement, some businesses may want to skip the data warehouse and
build an independent data mart
...


Data Warehouse Tables
Within the data warehouse, data is physically stored in individual tables
within a relational database
...

Experts will deploy a number of different table design approaches to
support the diverse business needs, performance requirements, and storage
constraints
...
Such facts are often referred to
as measures; and (2) dimension tables that allow analysis of measures from
different perspectives such as product, time, or geography
...
To improve the performance of
queries, database designers may choose to create aggregate or summary
tables around a fact table such that there may be a DAILY_SALES_FACT
table, MONTHLY_SALES_FACT table, and YEARLY_SALES_FACT
table
...

Dimension tables are also referred to as lookup tables or reference
tables
...

The groupings and product hierarchy for the material IDs may reside in
a separate table such as PRODUCT_GROUPING
...
You can think of dimensions as
the ways by which you want to analyze facts, for example, sales by geography or sales by product
...

Data is said to be stored in normalized tables in a transaction system when
a minimal amount of data is replicated in each table and a data element
needs to be updated in only one place
...
In a data warehouse or
data mart, the emphasis is on storing data in ways that facilitate analysis
and that speed query performance
...
Normalization in an operational system
means the facts and the dimensions will be spread across many tables
...
Trying to report on which
customers bought which products means joining multiple tables and
aggregating information from multiple tables, which will produce incorrect
query results
...

Customer
Customer
ID

Ship_To_City

WILM_91

Sparta

Order Header
Order
ID

Customer
ID

10248 WILM_91

Order
Date

Required
Date

10-Jul-2007

17-Jul-2007

Subtotal Freight
$58
...
38 $3
...
00

12

0
...
80

10

0
...
80

5

5
...
For example, the transaction system may store a plant ID for
the individual facility that produces a product, but it may not contain
information about where the plants are located and to which business units they belong
...

In some respects, business users may not care about how the
data is physically stored, whether in the data warehouse or in the
transaction system
...
However, the better that business users can define
requirements in advance, the better that data modelers might be
able to store data in a way that facilitates the analysis
...

If users want to routinely analyze these two different subject areas
together, then the data modeler may ultimately decide to store them
in one common fact table
...

The network between the servers and the end users (whether internal
business users or external customers) are also critical pinch points in
the BI environment
...


34

Chapter 2

For smaller businesses, targetted BI deployments, or those with
scalability issues, two emerging technologies are worth noting: appliances and Software as a Service (SaaS)
...
3 Business intelligence appliances that also
include BI capabilities are even newer
...
Hardware vendors
such as IBM and HP also increasingly offer data warehouse appliances
...
The promise
of an appliance is a complete, optimized solution that delivers better
performance at a lower cost of ownership than if a company were to
purchase and install these individual components
...
A third-party vendor hosts the technical infrastructure that customers then access via the Web
...
com uses a SaaS model
...
com, SeaTab’s Pivot Link, and LucidEra
...
The
operational systems provide the basic data that feed the data warehouse
either in real-time or on a periodic basis
...
The implementation can either facilitate business intelligence or become so monolithic and inflexible that
it becomes a technical, data wasteland
...

IT personnel should minimize technobabble and avoid overemphasizing the technical architecture for technology’s sake
...
You can
have a perfectly architected data warehouse, and yet if you don’t have the
right BI front-end tools, you won’t achieve business intelligence success
...
Conversely, while you can have a powerful,
intuitive BI front-end, if you have not paid attention to the underlying
technical components discussed in the last chapter, your initiative will
fail and users will blame the tool for any underlying problems
...

This chapter describes the various BI front-end tools that are
highly visible to business users
...
As discussed in Chapter 1 (the
section “Technology Changes Enabling BI”), vendors offer an increasing
breadth of capabilities within one BI suite
...
This
list is not exhaustive and as vendors acquire each other and/or introduce
new modules, specific names may change
...


Business Query and Reporting
Business query and reporting tools are often referred to as “ad hoc query
tools
...
Click here for terms of use
...
The difference is that a business user, usually a power
user, may have built the report, rather than an information technology (IT) person
...
Business query and reporting tools allow for this and are
most often used for decision-making and management purposes
...

In some cases, a report is truly ad hoc; it’s a one-off business question that will never be posed again
...
Table 3-1 lists some sample fixed
reports that may lead to an ad hoc query
...
It’s important to recognize the iterative nature of business
intelligence and to ensure you have flexible business intelligence tools
...
The terms “query” and “reporting” are
sometimes used interchangeably because a business query and reporting
tool will have both capabilities—getting to the data and formatting it to
create a report
...
The most basic of formatting capabilities allow for changing the font of column headings and making them bold and centered
...

Simple report styles include displaying information in a cross-tab report,
a chart, or a master-detail report with groupings and subtotals
...
More complex formatting capabilities include the ability to present multiple charts on a page, perhaps
coming from different data sources
...


A Business View of the Data
Business query tools allow business users to access a data source via
business terms without having to write any SQL
...
A key feature of a business query tool
is that it has a business view or metadata layer that hides the complexity
of the physical database structure from the business user by:
■

■
■

Using business terminology rather than physical field names
...
L33_NAME (the physical
table and field name in the Relational Database Management System
[RDBMS])
...

Providing metrics that may calculate and aggregate facts such as revenue, number of customers, number of orders, number of incidents,
and average selling price
...

This business view is the most important piece of your BI frontend tools and one in which the business and IT must work together
to model
...
When the business view looks too much like the data warehouse

38

Chapter 3

Figure 3-1 The BusinessObjects universe presents users with a business view of
the data
...
)

What Is Structured Query Language (SQL)
SQL, pronounced “sequel,” is a computer language used to communicate with a relational database
...
Querying a database with SQL can be fairly complicated
...
While
there is a common set of SQL commands, such as SELECT and
SUM, each database vendor may have its own SQL extensions or
dialect
...
Sometimes when trying to develop a complex business
query, you may run into limitations inherent in the SQL language
...
Asking a query about which products were cross-sold
to the same customers this year versus last year would require very
complex SQL and may be better answered in an OLAP database
...
Poor business view design also forces users to put too much logic and too many
calculations inside individual reports and dashboards
...


Production Reporting
Whereas business query and reporting tools allow for basic report formatting, production reporting tools have much more sophisticated formatting and design capabilities
...
Again,
the terminology can be misleading as some business query and reporting tools can create pixel perfect reports, be embedded in operational
systems, and are used across an enterprise
...
Examples of production reporting tools include Actuate e
...

A production reporting tool may access a transaction system directly
to create a document such as an invoice, a bank statement, a check,
or a list of open orders
...
IT usually develops these reports for the following reasons:
■

■

■

The data source is an operational system in which you can’t take the
risk that “untrained” users may launch resource intensive and runaway queries with a business query tool
...

The information requirements are common to all users and departments and are static, such as for regulatory reports
...


40

Chapter 3

Characteristic

Business Query and
Production Reporting Reporting

Primary author

IT developer

Power user or business user

Primary purpose

Document preparation

Decision making, management

Report delivery

Paper or e-bill, embedded Portal, spreadsheet, e-mail
in application

Print quality

Pixel perfect

Presentation quality

User base

Tens of thousands

Hundreds or thousands

Data source

Operational transaction
system

Data warehouse or mart,
occasionally transaction system

Level of data detail

Granular

Aggregated

Scope

Operational

Tactical, strategic

Usage

Often embedded within
an application

Most often BI as separate
application

Table 3-2 Differences Between Production Reporting Tools and Business Query
Tools (Source: BIScorecard
...
None of these differences is an
absolute, except that they serve the needs to distinct user groups and in
many cases, distinct applications
...
OLAP moves the
focus from “what” is happening, to exploring “why” something is happening
...

OLAP provides interactive analysis by different dimensions (i
...
,
geography, product, time) and different levels of detail (year, quarter,
month)
...
Many BI products, though, will now
provide drill-down and pivot capabilities without a full-blown OLAP
engine or OLAP database on the back-end
...


The Business Intelligence Front-End

41

OLAP users want highly formatted reports that are based on multidimensional data; report users immediately want to drill when they see
a problem with a particular metric in a report
...

The following characteristics continue to distinguish OLAP tools
from business query and reporting tools:
■

■

■

■

■

Multidimensional Users analyze numerical values from different
dimensions such as product, time, and geography
...

Consistently fast As users navigate different dimensions and levels
within a dimension, OLAP means fast—the speed of thought
...

Report users, of course, do not want slow reports either, but some
reports take this long to run and must be scheduled
...
Pivoting gives users the ability to view information from different
perspectives such as by geography or by product
...
This kind of interactivity within a nonOLAP report ranges from nonexistent to only recently possible
...
Reporting, to
the contrary, can be at the lowest level of detail: rather than sales by
product, you might have individual line items for a particular order
number
...
In OLAP, you might want to analyze
percentage contribution or market share
...
Users may analyze
this percentage market share by a number of other dimensions, such
as actual versus budget, this year versus last year, or for a particular
group of products
...

Detailed reports, however, often rely on simple subtotals or calculations of values that are displayed on the report itself
...


OLAP Platforms
The OLAP platform is about how the data is stored to allow for multidimensional analysis
...
On the one hand, business users should not have to
care at all about how the data is stored, replicated, and cached, and yet
the OLAP architecture greatly affects what you can analyze and how
...

There are four primary OLAP architectures as described in Table 3-3
...
Multidimensional OLAP (MOLAP) platforms replicate data into a
purpose-built storage that ensures fast analysis
...
Dynamic OLAP (DOLAP) will
automatically generate a small multidimensional cache when users run
a query
...

Architecture Primary Difference

Vendor

ROLAP

Calculations done in a relational Oracle BI EE, SAP Netweaver
BI, MicroStrategy, Cognos 8,
database, large data volumes,
BusinessObjects Web
less predictable drill times
...
Cubes provide write
access for inputting budget data
or performing what-if analysis
...


Microsoft Analysis Services,
SAS OLAP, Oracle’s Hyperion
Essbase

DOLAP

Mini cache is built at query
run time
...
All of this has sometimes scared IT away from OLAP
...


With OLAP, a report is just a starting view, say, Sales for 2007 by
Country—a summarized starting point
...
In a
strictly relational reporting world, the starting view and end result would
be two entirely separate reports, with dozens of iterations in between
...

In fact, for three of the leading OLAP products (Oracle’s Hyperion
Essbase, Microsoft Analysis Services, SAP Business Explorer), the
spreadsheet was initially the only interface
...

Today, Excel continues to be an important OLAP interface, but
in addition, users can explore data via OLAP viewers
...
In addition, business query tools and production reporting tools may also be able to

What Are Multidimensional Expressions (MDX)?
MDX is a query language similar to SQL but used to manipulate
data within an OLAP database
...
As MDX gained industry acceptance,
a number of other OLAP databases added support for MDX such
that today OLAP viewers will generate MDX to access and analyze
data in a number of different OLAP databases
...
(Reprinted with permission
...

Figure 3-2 shows an example of a decomposition tree via Microsoft
ProClarity, a relatively unique way of visually navigating through hierarchical information
...
Many of the leading BI suite vendors offer OLAP
viewers to third-party OLAP data sources, sometimes via the business
query and reporting tool, or via a production reporting tool, or via a special OLAP viewer
...


Microsoft Office
It’s often said that Microsoft Excel is unofficially the leading BI
tool
...
Yet users

The Business Intelligence Front-End

45

are passionate about spreadsheet integration, and it is the preferred
interface for power users
...
In
the past, Excel “integration” was often limited to a one-time export of
data from the BI tool to a disconnected spreadsheet
...
Duet, a product jointly developed
by SAP and Microsoft, for example, uses the familiar Office interface
for accessing reports from the SAP transaction system and from the
data warehouse
...
This is an example of how Office
integration has moved beyond just the Excel spreadsheet to include
other Microsoft Office applications such as PowerPoint, Word, and
Outlook
...


Dashboards
Stephen Few, president of Perceptual Edge and a visualization expert,
provides the best definition of a dashboard:
A dashboard is a visual display of the most important information
needed to achieve one or more objectives; consolidated and arranged
on a single screen so the information can be monitored at a glance
...
A dashboard may be comprised of:
■
■
■
■

A map that color-codes where sales are performing well or poorly
A trend line that tracks stock outs
A cross tab of top-selling products
A key performance indicator with an arrow to show if sales are according to plan

Figure 3-3 shows an example of a customer support dashboard created with MicroStrategy Enterprise Dashboard
...
(Advanced visualization is discussed further in Chapter 14
...
(Reprinted with permission
...
Not all tools allow this, though, and may
force IT to build dashboards in advance
...
Exactly how they do this and what constraints there are in the accessibility and number of data sources vary
widely from product to product
...
Early Executive
Information Systems (EIS) of the late 1980s tried to deliver similar capabilities
...
EISs were often customcoded, inflexible dashboards based on quarterly data
...
As shown in
Figure 3-3, they also increasingly leverage advanced visualization capabilities that facilitate greater insights and conveying more information in
less space
...


Scorecards
The terms “dashboards” and “scorecards” are often used interchangeably,
although they are indeed different things
...
(Reprinted with permission
...
Some dashboards may additionally display metrics
and targets with visual traffic lighting to show the performance of that
metric, but you should not assume that all dashboard tools support this
capability
...
Such scorecard products are often certified by the
Balanced Scorecard Collaborative
...

Although there are a number of powerful scorecard products
on the market, the biggest challenge in deploying scorecards is in
getting the business to agree on common objectives, drivers, targets,
and accountability
...


48

Chapter 3

Performance Management
Performance management and business intelligence historically have
been treated as separate applications, with the former being controlled
primarily by finance and the latter by IT or individual business units
...
In rudimentary deployments, BI provides better access to
data
...

Performance management tools help optimize, manage, and measure that performance by providing the following key components:
budgeting and planning capabilities, financial consolidation, and strategic or balanced scorecards
...
Balancing the often
diverse priorities of different business units and users is also easier
when these requirements are evaluated against those goals
...
The technology that supports these processes
includes BPM packaged applications such as budgeting, planning
and consolidation, as well as BI tools such as extract, transform and
load (ETL), report and query, and OLAP multidimensional cubes
...
3
While I have not seen indication that performance management has
helped accelerate BI adoption or vice versa, it is clear that the two are
interrelated
...

NOTE While performance management may have its roots in finance, it is by
no means limited to financial plans
...


The Business Intelligence Front-End

49

Alphabet Soup: BPM, CPM, EPM, PM
Here come those acronyms again! Industry analysts, media, and
vendors will refer to performance management with any number
of acronyms: business performance management (BPM), corporate
performance management (CPM), enterprise performance management (EPM), and performance management (PM)
...
The one major point of confusion is when “BPM”
is used to refer to business process management, a completely different field
...


Planning
Many companies have manual planning processes compiled through
thousands of disconnected spreadsheets
...
Part of the planning process is reviewing historical actuals for a basis of comparison
...
An
initial plan may be based on business rules such as percentage change
from one year to another
...

Once a plan has been finalized, managers want to monitor adherence to and progress toward the plan
...


Financial Consolidation
As individual business units aggregate into a total company, financial
consolidation tools help ensure things such as intercompany eliminations, currency conversion, and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance
...

Financial consolidation may be provided by the ERP system or by a
dedicated tool
...


Analytic Applications
Henry Morris of International Data Corporation (IDC) first coined the
term analytic application in 1997
...

Extract, transform, and integrate data from multiple sources and allow
for time-based analysis
...


Business query tools, OLAP, and dashboards may all be components
of an analytic application, but it is this last bullet item that most sets an
analytic application apart from other BI modules
...
You can either buy or build an analytic application
...

When you “build” an analytic application, you determine how and
whether to calculate “average sale per store visit” and in which reports
you want this metric to appear
...
With “build” analytic
applications, the development environment may provide templates
and engines that allow you to assemble applications
...


The Business Intelligence Front-End

51

Emerging BI Modules
The modules discussed in this chapter have relatively wide usage and
product maturity
...
Dashboard and
scorecard software are more recent, with more limited usage, but are
mature software products
...
These include
predictive analytics, BI search, advanced visualization, mash-ups, and
rich Internet applications, to name a few
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
The BI front-end consists of the tools and interfaces that business
people use to access the data and monitor trends
...
Performance management tools are used in
conjunction with BI tools and the BI architecture to improve planning,
produce financial reports, and measure performance against the objectives and goals of the company
...
They are, however, only
one aspect of a business intelligence solution, albeit an important one
...

Understand that the business tools must work in conjunction with the
underlying technical architecture; an intuitive tool is only as reliable
and useful as the data that it accesses
...

Consider the distinct capabilities of the different tool segments and
offer the appropriate tool to the appropriate user group (discussed
more in Chapter 12)
...


This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 4

Measures of Success

There is not a clear yardstick for successful business intelligence
...
While the industry would like to give a single, objective
measure—such as return on investment (ROI)—the reality is that ROI
is derived from imprecise inputs upon which few stakeholders agree
...
Instead, there are multiple measures of success, with varying degree of importance and accuracy
...
They must participate
actively and have a sense of ownership to the project
...
As Figure 4-1 shows, the majority (68%) rated their deployments in
the middle of the road as moderately successful
...
The good news is that only a very
small percentage (8%) rated their deployment as mostly a failure
...
1 They have a builtin incentive to make you think that BI has been a disaster so that you
will buy more tools and services to fix these failures
...
Perhaps
...
Click here for terms of use
...
As well,
this general assessment of the BI industry also mirrored responses from a
2006 BIScorecard/Intelligent Enterprise survey
...

One measure of BI success is how much business intelligence contributes to a company’s performance, and as shown later in Figure 4-4,
this is the preferred measure of BI success
...
Thirty-two percent of respondents said
their BI solution contributes significantly to company performance
...
Table 4-1 shows the correlations between how a respondent rates their BI deployment and the
perceived business impact
...
Which aspects are most important depends on the specific
industry and whether you are a publicly held company, nonprofit, or government agency
...
The survey question did not specify which aspect of business performance was
most impacted by business intelligence
...
Or conversely, if the BI solution is contributing significantly
to the business, it would of course be viewed as very successful
...
Norway Post, for example, has achieved significant business value from its BI and performance
management initiatives: revenues increased 73% from 2000 to 2006,
profitability went from –655 million NOK (Norwegian krone) in 2000 to
+853 million NOK in 2006, while employee and customer satisfaction
improved (see Figure 4-3)
...
4 “We haven’t solved every area of the business
...
The production and operational reporting
is excellent, yet we lack these capabilities in human resources and
marketing
...
“Business intelligence is of course an enabler
...
BI managed to
show each manager their status right now
...
79 billion)
...
With privatization, Norway Post converted into a stock
company and has implemented all the same steering and reporting
standards as a publicly held stock company
...

To provide some perspective, the distance from northern Norway
to the southern part is similar in distance from New York City to
Miami, Florida, in the United States, and yet 87% of the letters
are delivered within one day
...
Norway Post’s
vision is “to become the world’s most future-oriented post and
logistics group
...
The percentage of business
users seeing the business impact as significant is 15% higher than
the percentage of IT professionals saying the impact on company
performance has been significant
...
A small
percentage of survey respondents (6%) consider the BI deployment as
being very successful yet as not having significant business impact
...


How to Measure Success
There are a number of ways to measure the success of your BI deployment, some qualitative and some more quantitative and objective
...
The challenge
here is that qualitative benefits such as “better access to data” are
rarely a way of garnering executive level support and funding for BI
investments
...


Measures of BI Success or Failure

Improved business performance

70%

Better access to data

68%

Support of key stakeholders

53%
50%

User perception that it is mission critical
Return on investment

43%

Percentage of active users

31%

Cost savings

31%

Number of defined users

17%
0%

10%

20%

30%

40%

50%

60%

70%

80%

Figure 4-4 BI success is measured more by a perception of improved business
performance and qualitative measures than by quantitative measures
...
One reason companies rarely calculate this is that
while it is fairly easy to determine the cost or investment portion of a BI
implementation, it is not easy to determine the return, a common challenge for many IT investments
...

Identifying cost savings is easier when you eliminate specific reporting systems or reduce head count
...

In other words, there has been cost avoidance by providing a BI solution
...

There have been several industry studies to determine the average
ROI for BI projects
...
IDC determined
the average 3-year ROI was 401% for the 62 projects measured
...
While 47 companies participated in the study, less than
a quarter measured ROI
...
The average ROI was 431%, and the
median was 112%, with less than a year payback period
...

As an example, Continental Airlines has invested $30 million in realtime data warehousing
...
Yet Data Warehouse
Manager Anne Marie Reynolds says they really don’t measure their BI
success according to ROI
...
It’s hard
to get people to commit to the numbers
...
But now BI is just the cost of doing business and part of the infrastructure
...
”7
Reynolds’ comments highlight an important challenge with business
intelligence: often, an organization’s BI efforts will stall, because they can’t

60

Chapter 4

articulate the expected ROI
...
Imagine if
someone asked you to provide the ROI for having an office telephone!
Documenting the ROI of a business intelligence project is meant to ensure
the project will provide measurable business value
...


Calculating ROI
Despite the limitations of using ROI as a measure of success, it is a
number that provides a basis for comparison to other BI implementations
and IT initiatives
...
In this respect,

About Continental Airlines
Continental Airlines is the world’s fifth-largest airline, with 3,100
daily departures throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia
...
Fortune magazine has repeatedly named
Continental the number one Most Admired Global Airline on its list
of Most Admired Global Companies
...
It’s also interesting to note that while most survey respondents
used multiple measures of success, a higher percentage of companies who
said their BI had a significant impact on business performance also used
ROI as a measure
...

Use ROI as an objective measure of success, even if it’s only a backof-the-envelope calculation and not all stakeholders agree on the cost
savings and revenue contribution from business intelligence
...
In
simplistic terms, if you have $1 million to deposit in a bank today, next
year, assuming 5% interest, it would be worth $1,050,000
...
R is the discount rate for your company
...
In estimating the revenue improvement, take the
amount revenue has actually increased and then assign a percentage of
that for which BI has been a key enabler
...
Yet here too, there is room for debate and fudging of definitions
...
Some vendors
would count this person as a user who would have to pay for a BI recipient license
...

I would, however, like you to reach a little higher when you think of
who is a BI user, and as confirmed in the peer networking, survey, and
case study interviews, most people do not count static recipients as BI
users
...
They may not have a live connection to the BI system
to control either what information they receive or when
...


BI Users as a Percentage of Employees
So let’s assume there is direct access to the BI system or to the data warehouse
...
When I discussed number of
users with Continental Airlines, for example, they initially told me they
had 1400 data warehouse users
...
At first
blush, it didn’t sound like BI had permeated all ranks at Continental
...

The 1400 users are only users who have a direct logon to the data
warehouse
...
As an example, within the operations control centers at each airport, dispatchers view daily on-time performance
and flight status for all planes
...

While the information is coming from the data warehouse, because the
display is from a custom application, the data warehouse team does not
count these dispatchers as among the 1400 users
...
9 The gate agents access the data warehouse
through a custom application, so they also are not counted as BI users
because the data warehouse only sees the application as one user
...

Despite the discrepancies in what to count, there is a major difference between the case studies in this book and the industry as a whole,

Measures of Success

63

and that is in the degree of BI penetration
...
10 The problem with the way we posed
this survey question is that we left the definition for the denominator
or the “potential” BI users up to the survey respondent
...

In the Successful BI survey, then, I specifically asked about the
percentage of total employees (versus potential BI users) that have
access to a BI tool; the average is 25%
...

Indicating that the industry has not yet fully realized how wide a net BI
can cast, when asked if the BI deployment were wildly successful and
budget were not an issue, what percentage of employees should have
access to a BI tool, respondents said they thought only 53% to 55% of
employees should have access to a BI tool
...


Business intelligence as a set of technologies and processes is still
relatively young at less than 20 years old
...

Think about it: does everyone in your company have a cell phone? Did
they 20 years ago? And yet, portable phones (more the size of briefcases),
existed in the late 1980s
...
Nowadays a cell phone is a musthave business tool; it is a purchase that does not have to be justified
with ROI
...
” BI eventually will be viewed in the same way
...
”
—Ken Olson, founder of Digital Equipment
Corporation (DEC), 1977
“I think there is a world market for maybe 5 computers
...
Indeed, this may
be partly true, but currently we just haven’t made BI relevant enough for
all users, particularly beyond information workers
...
Instead,
picture all employees having access to information to support their daily
decisions and actions, with tools that work in ways they need them to
...
When BI is made relevant and
accessible to frontline and field workers as well as externally to customers
and suppliers, then BI usage will reach beyond 100% of employees
...

No matter what you think the total BI potential is—100% of employees or only 55% of employees as shown in the earlier chart—the survey
results clearly show that there is huge untapped potential
...

Executives and managers are the next highest segments
...
The Dow Chemical Company has approximately 12,000
worldwide internal BI users, which accounts for 83% of its professional
workers
...
S
...
This is a drastic
improvement over its original user base of 500 just 3 years ago
...
There are some technical
issues when BI reaches beyond company boundaries, but some of the larger
barriers are organizational and a matter of being aware of the benefits
...
The data

BI Usage by User Segment
Business & Financal Analysts

Executives

Managers

Inside Staff

Field staff

Customers

Suppliers
0

10

20
30
Current % with BI

40

50

Figure 4-5 Of the percentage of total employees by user segment, information
workers show the highest BI penetration
...
, a subsidiary of Corporate Express NV
(NYSE: CXP) is one of the world’s largest business-to-business
suppliers of office and computer products and services, with 2006
sales of approximately $4
...
The company operates in more than 17 countries and is reportedly the only
business-to-business (B2B) office products company with a true
one-company global capability
...
In addition to commercial brands, Corporate Express also has its own private label of office products, a line of business that has grown rapidly
in the last three years, empowered by business intelligence
...
The
distributors could not readily see this and had no incentive whatsoever to
improve it
...

For Corporate Express, providing customers access to the BI environment has become a necessary part of doing business
...
A recent customer win for OfficeMax has
been with BB&T Corporation, the fifth-largest bank in the United States
...
14 Corporate Express expects its new customer reporting and analysis capabilities to be a significant competitive differentiator
in terms of breadth of data, speed of analysis, and level of detail
...


Percentage of Active Users
I was pleasantly surprised by the survey results that the percentage of
active users is a more often cited measure of success than the number
of defined users
...
Then
again, fewer than a third of companies do measure this!
Historically, business intelligence tools have been implemented
primarily on a departmental basis, where greater emphasis is on using
the BI platform and less on monitoring the system
...
The ability to monitor activity for the entire BI platform (from data warehouse to BI front-end
tools—see Figure 2-3 in Chapter 2) has been somewhat lacking in
the industry
...
For BI tool
vendors, MicroStrategy, BusinessObjects, and Information Builders
are examples of a few that have a longer history of providing built-in
capabilities to determine usage
...
Three years ago, the percentage of
users who used BI on a daily basis was less than 10% of the registered
BI users
...
15

Other Measures of Success
Other ways to measure the success of your BI initiative include the
following:
■

Number of business intelligence applications This includes dashboards, business views, and custom applications such as BI content
embedded in an operational system
...
Business users want more, faster, as they
are constantly coming up with new ways to exploit their BI capabilities
...
” Instead, it is a measure of requests that the BI team should fulfill rather than requests for
capabilities business users should be able to do themselves
...
If one standard report
with greater interactivity and better prompting can serve the needs of
100s of users (versus having 100 different reports for 100 users), then
a single report is better
...
Having
a lower number of reports that are more useful provides a lower cost
of ownership and an easier ability for information consumers to know
where to find relevant information
...

Elimination of independent spreadsheets “Independent” is a key
word here as delivering BI via spreadsheets may be an enabler to user
adoption, as long as a live link is maintained back to the BI platform
...

Increased customer service This has an impact on revenues,
so here too, assign a percentage for how much BI contributed to
improved customer service
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
The success of a BI deployment can be measured by both intangible criteria such as better access to data and by objective criteria such as revenue
improvement, number of users, and return on investment
...
In evaluating the success of your business intelligence deployment:
■

■

■
■

Use ROI as an objective measure of success, even if this is only calculated on the back of an envelope
...
Do try to
assign a dollar value to these softer benefits and state the value in
terms of how they align with the strategic goals of the business
...

When initially embarking on your project, agree to and build into the
program or project plan the measures of success
...


This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 5

The LOFT Effect

As I analyzed trends from the successful BI companies, a consistent
theme emerged
...
What catapulted them from BI mediocrity
to success were multiple aspects
...
” When I look closely at
the factors that led to the change from mediocre business intelligence
to greater success, there were varying degrees of Luck, Opportunity,
Frustration, and Threat: LOFT
...
While working at Dow Chemical, there were times
I felt luck played a big role in our BI efforts, but in hindsight, perhaps
it wasn’t luck at all
...

“Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity
...
There were three aspects to Dow’s information management
strategy then, all of which played major roles in business intelligence:
■

Dow Diamond Systems, which involved implementing SAP globally
as its primary ERP system, replacing numerous custom applications
...
Click here for terms of use
...
2 Not only was this a systems implementation, but also was a work process redesign and optimization effort
...
3
Dow Workstation, which involved standardizing all desktop computers
and operating systems globally
...
Without a standard workstation, implementing a global, client/server BI solution would have had
even more technical barriers to overcome than those brought by the
newness of data warehousing and business intelligence
...
Initially,
Dow thought reporting and analysis would come directly from SAP
...


When I first began working on the Global Reporting Project in
1993, I had never even heard the term “data warehouse
...
Management reporting was
not new to me, but up until this point my work—and most everyone’s
in information systems—was regionally focused
...
I was unaware of and pretty much ignored what
my counterparts in the same business unit in Texas were doing
...
It was our business to know what all the regions and business units were doing in terms of reporting and analysis
...
This global focus was a major organizational and cultural
shift from a work perspective
...
S
...
Its products are used in a wide range of goods,
including toys, tools, textiles, pharmaceuticals, personal care items,
and water purification technologies
...

With the rise in feedstock costs and increasing world demand, the
company must continually look for more efficient ways to operate
to ensure profitability and preserve availability of natural resources
...


About BI at Dow
■
■
■
■

■
■

■
■
■

Start of BI efforts: 1993
Executive level sponsor: CIO
Business Intelligence Competency Center: Yes
Number of BI users: 12,000 or 28% of employees, plus an additional 10,000 customers
Number of source systems used for BI: 5
ETL/EIM tools: Currently custom, beginning to use IBM
DataStage
Data warehouse platform: Oracle
Data warehouse size: 7 TB with 70% updated daily
BI tools: BusinessObjects, Cognos PowerPlay, SAS JMP

of having a passport
...
Whatever work I started in the morning, a counterpart in the
United States added to in his time zone, and yet another continued in
Hong Kong
...

While the Global Reporting Project seemed like a good idea at the
time, what none of us fully realized was that the regional businesses
didn’t want what we were building
...
It
was mainframe-based and might be deemed archaic with today’s Web and
rich Windows interfaces, but at the time, it had all the key elements sales
and marketing wanted: good data with easy drill down
...

It was a custom-built client/server application, optimized for field sellers,
with personalized data, and intuitive, graphical interface
...
Even 15 years ago, Kreinberg was an executive who saw the
potential of information technology
...
Kreinberg decided to
make the Frankfurt initiative bigger, better, and broader
...

While the SUCCESS team rapidly delivered a slick interface, with
flashy charts and fast drill-down times, the Global Reporting Project
floundered amid data quality issues and queries that ran for hours
...
We held a meeting with
European executives and their business analysts to give a status update
...


Dow Globalizes
About 18 months into the project, we got lucky
...
As the global reporting team learned the news in
the cafeteria, many echoed a similar thought, “wow, did we get lucky!”
No longer would businesses be run on a regional basis, but rather, on a
truly global basis
...
Regional
DSSs became useless overnight
...
The experience with the SUCCESS initiative, however, provided
critical lessons to everyone on the Global Reporting Project that continue
to hold true today for anyone in the BI industry:

The LOFT Effect

75

(1) Business intelligence has to be easy to use—with personalized data—
and be fast, and (2) great ideas often come from the prototypes built
within departments and individual business units who are more agile,
focused on the needs of a smaller constituency
...

The truly global aspect of the Global Reporting Project was one
step ahead of Dow’s regional businesses that subsequently globalized
18 months into the BI project
...
Perhaps it had everything
to do with the forward thinking of the IT leaders and having a visionary
project manager—Dave Kepler, the original Global Reporting project
manager, went on to become CIO just a few years after he started the
Global Reporting Project
...
The
company, Conducive Technology, started out as an interactive multimedia company
...
4 As that business was
acquired by a competitor and spun off, the company changed focus
from multimedia to air freight forwarding
...
Much of the publicly
available data is too old and limited to be useful for booking purposes
...
5 In 2004, as Conducive Technology was improving its database
for its freight customers, the company realized that nobody was collecting and mining real-time flight data for external use
...
What
started as a database to optimize air freight logistics has morphed into
FlightStats, a platform and set of services to “transform information into
travel intelligence
...
The FlightStats
platform delivers real-time and historical flight information that
lowers travel-related costs and improves the travel experience
...
The company later
moved into air freight forwarding
...
FlightStats has provided
this information to airlines, airports, and travel agents since 2003
...


About BI at FlightStats
■
■
■

■

■
■
■

■
■

Start of BI efforts: 2001
Executive level sponsor: CEO
Number of BI users: 15 internal users, with more than 1 million
consumers per month
Number of source systems used for BI: Dozens of real-time,
flight sources, external to FlightStats
ETL/EIM tools: Pentaho’s Kettle
Data warehouse platform: PostgreSQL
Data warehouse size: 520 GB with millions of new records a day
updated in real-time
Number of subject areas: 2
BI tools: JasperReports with OpenReports

and airports
...

With on-time performance at its lowest level in seven years8 and
with the industry under increased pressure to provide a passenger bill
of rights, FlightStats has a unique opportunity to help solve passenger
woes by providing travel agents and consumers access to near real-time
flight performance information
...
Notice along the left side
of the figure a five-point scoring system
...


The LOFT Effect

77

Figure 5-1 FlightStats performance ratings show JetBlue’s poor performance out
of Newark, winter 2007
...
It’s a busy route subject to extreme
weather conditions
...
A Nor’easter April 15th
wreaked additional havoc for all airlines
...
Continental Airlines, the next biggest operator for
the same route, had a 64% on-time performance with an average delay
of 33 minutes, compared with JetBlue’s 47% on-time performance
and average delay of 69 minutes
...


The level of detail that FlightStats provides makes the information
actionable
...
”9 While it’s true
that the weather events made travel a nightmare for everyone during
that period, performance on this Newark route for March 15 to May 15
again shows JetBlue at the bottom and below the route average
...
Figure 5-2 shows FlightStats’

78

Chapter 5

Figure 5-2 FlightStats performance ratings show it’s better to fly JetBlue out of
John F
...


newest BI interface, FlightStats Analytics, with information for the three
New York–area airports in August
...
At John F
...

For FlightStats, successful business intelligence comes with recognizing a unique opportunity in the data they’ve amassed and enhanced
...
As this book
goes to print and as the airline industry finishes one of its worst summers for on-time performance, FlightStats is introducing FlightStats
Analytics to offer airports, airlines, and the travel industry greater analytic abilities to this unique data
...
The healthcare industry is not known for being
leaders in business intelligence or information technology, and yet,
Emergency Medical Associates is
...
10 Through this system, EMA amassed data
related to emergency room diagnosis and operations that nobody had yet
mined
...
He saw an opportunity to leverage the unique
data EMA had amassed
...
By improving emergency room operations,
our patients benefit, the physicians benefit, and our whole organization
benefits
...
However, the degree to which
Dow exploited this asset and realized its importance only came with
the merger of Union Carbide in 2001 that made the Dow Chemical
Company the largest chemical company in the world
...

Dow employees who had taken their information systems somewhat
for granted up until this point, now realized just how good they had
had it compared with Union Carbide’s antiquated systems
...
12 The opportunities for synergy were there; could
Dow exploit them?
Dow’s CIO Dave Kepler explains that the operational systems and
global data warehouse were key requirements to drive the synergies
from the merger with Union Carbide
...
”13

Do Business Requirements Always Map to Opportunities?
Often with business intelligence projects, business users first must
define their requirements and IT then builds a solution
...


80

Chapter 5

About Emergency Medical Associates
Emergency Medical Associates (EMA) is a group of 250 emergency
physicians who are contracted to manage and staff emergency
departments at 18 hospitals throughout New Jersey and New York
...
The data warehouse contains information on over 8 million ER visits, making it
one of the largest sources of ER data in the world
...


About BI at EMA
■
■
■
■

■
■
■
■
■
■

Start of BI efforts: 1999
Executive level sponsor: Chief technology officer
Business Intelligence Competency Center: Yes
Number of BI users: 220 users which include 40% of the company’s employees as well as external hospital staff
Number of source systems used for BI: 11
ETL/EIM tools: Custom
Data warehouse platform: Oracle
Data warehouse size: 100 GB, updated daily
Number of subject areas: 3
BI tools: BusinessObjects XI

Whenever a new opportunity presents itself, the requirements
may not be well known
...
IT
must learn to expect that precise requirements will change on a daily
basis, but always within the framework of the broader vision
...
The reality is, the business users may only
Successful BI companies start with a vision—whether it’s to improve
air travel, improve patient care, or drive synergies
...
The detail requirements are not precisely known
...


The LOFT Effect

81

know detailed requirements once they’ve been able to experiment with
different tools and explore information to determine what most supports
their vision
...
It was only after exploring the data and prototyping different
reports and dashboards that the team arrived at the final metrics that
provided the best insights and benefits
...
Sometimes the degree of frustration has to reach a boiling point before business intelligence becomes
a priority
...

At Continental Airlines, the data warehouse began in 1998 driven
by two key initiatives: revenue management and customer relationship
management
...
Part of the airline’s turnaround strategy was a Go Forward
Plan that promised to transform the customer’s flying experience and
to appeal to more business travelers
...
“We couldn’t
...
”16 It took a few years to get to a
single view of the customer but now, detailed customer information is
available within seconds of an event
...
1-800
CONTACTS has been selling contact lenses via mail order, phone, and
the Internet for 11 years
...
18 A key differentiator for 1-800 CONTACTS is customer service
...
“All
the agents were clamoring for information
...

The biggest dissatisfaction in their job was to have to wait until the next
morning to look at a piece of paper taped to the wall to see how they
were performing,” recalls Dave Walker, vice president of operations
...
Orders are placed by phone or via
the Web (1800contacts
...
On any given day, the company sells
as many contact lenses as 2,500 retail optical shops combined
...


About BI at 1-800 CONTACTS
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■

Start of BI efforts: 2004
Executive level sponsor: CFO
Business Intelligence Competency Center: Yes
Number of BI users: 400 or 60% of employees
Number of source systems used for BI: 3
ETL/EIM tools: Microsoft Integration Services
Data warehouse platform: Microsoft SQL Server
Data warehouse size: 125GB with 80% updated every 15 minutes
Number of subject areas: 3
BI tools: Microsoft BI

most about being held accountable for things they couldn’t control without access to information to improve their performance
...
Executive meetings start with a debate about how numbers
are compiled and whose are correct rather than with a discussion of the
insights such numbers provide
...
There were 31 different
BI experts creating similar reports and all coming up with different numbers
...


Threat
After going through two bankruptcies, there is nothing like the threat of
another bankruptcy to spur a business into profound change
...
It ranked last out

83

The LOFT Effect

of ten major airlines for on-time arrival, baggage handling, customer complaints, and denied boardings from overbooking of flights
...

CEO Gordon Bethune and COO Greg Brenneman developed the Go
Forward Plan, consisting of the following goals, to turn the airline around:
■

■

■

■

Fly to Win by changing the mix of customers from mostly leisure
travelers to more business travelers and focusing on routes that were
profitable
...

Make Reliability a Reality by moving from tenth place on customer
service metrics to the top 50% and improving the fleet
...


The Go Forward Plan had an immediate effect on the airline, returning
it to profitability in 1995
...
From 1995
to 2001, Continental reported consistent profits, but like many airlines,
has struggled to return to consistent profitability after the September 11,
2001, terrorist attacks and rising fuel costs
...
05
−

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Net profit margin ratio

(0
...
10)
(0
...
20)
(0
...
30)
(0
...
40)
Continental Airlines
Northwest Airlines

US Airways Group, Inc
...
S
...
S
...
Information
for United Airlines is not included here as significant losses in 2005 and
subsequent restructuring skew the chart display
...
It’s
noteworthy that Continental was profitable in 2006 while some of its chief
competitors operated under bankruptcy protection and posted losses
...
In addition to improved financial performance,
whereas Continental once ranked tenth out of ten in customer service
measures, it now routinely is recognized for its customer service with
awards from J
...
Power and Associates, Fortune, and the Official Airline
Guide (OAG)
...
Business intelligence is pivotal in
Continental’s ability to respond to these threats
...

Rising healthcare costs have reached crisis levels in the United States
...
21 Under this law, the state
will reimburse these hospitals, but the formula for reimbursement has
changed significantly in the past several years such that hospitals on
average are reimbursed only a third of the $1
...
22
Reimbursements under Medicare and Medicaid have also not kept pace
with hospital costs or inflation, paying only 89 cents and 73 cents,
respectively, for every dollar spent
...
Under these threats, patient care is threatened as
hospital income declines and as hospitals are forced to close
...
The Joint Commission is a national organization that provides hospitals and healthcare providers measurements
for accreditation, accountability, and public reporting
...
EMA responded to these multiple threats by providing doctors and hospital administrators access to information to manage emergency rooms more efficiently
...
“WEBEMARS™ has and continues to provide invaluable data
management services to the Saint Barnabas Health Care System and

The LOFT Effect

85

our Emergency Departments
...
”24

The Role of Time
With some of the successful BI companies, it seems that time has
played a role in their success, that BI had to be failing or mediocre for a
period before these companies learned how to use business intelligence
more effectively
...
1-800
CONTACTS, for example, only began their data warehouse project in
the fall 2004 with the first application available in spring 2005
...

Figure 5-4 shows the relationship between the length of a BI deployment and the perceived success
...

Twelve percent of first-year BI deployments rate their projects as being
For How Many Years Has Your BI Deployment Been Available?

< 1 Year

1
...


80%

90%

100%

86

Chapter 5

very successful
...
Beyond the first year, though, the rate of very
successful projects stays about the same at 24% to 28%, with no significant change if the deployment has been available for two years or ten
...
At this point, there is not enough data to say that the LOFT
effect is a prerequisite for wild success
...
It’s also clear that
the degree to which BI best practices are followed has an impact on
the degree of success, so even if there is a LOFT effect present, don’t
expect success unless you are applying other best practices
...

Discussing the role of “threats” on BI success, one BI manager said,
“well, when people are fat and happy, you don’t have to be as smart
...
There is not enough data to determine if business intelligence enabled this efficiency or if efficiency happened first, and thus
better BI use followed
...
BI teams can use the LOFT effect as a way of communicating with the business to see how business intelligence can be
used more effectively
...
BI teams can study the opportunities and threats portions to
understand where BI can help the business pursue opportunities and
address threats
...
In the most successful
BI companies, a LOFT effect has moved them from being moderately
successful with business intelligence to extremely successful and having
a profound impact on the business
...
The business and BI teams
should explore the role that business intelligence can play in exploiting
business opportunities, addressing frustration or pain, and squashing
the threats
...

Successful BI is possible within a short time frame
...


This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 6

Executive Support

If you ask people what the number one enabler for a successful BI
deployment is, most will respond “executive support
...
However, getting that executive support may not be easy,
particularly if senior executives don’t believe in or understand the value
of business intelligence
...
“
—Hybrid business/IT professional, transportation industry

Executive Support and Success
When survey respondents were asked to rate the importance of various cultural and organizational aspects that affect the success of a BI
project, executive support consistently ranked at the top of the list,
along with IT and business partnership (see Figure 6-1)
...
There was little difference in this ranking regardless of the company size, duration of the
BI project, or if a respondent’s BI project was deemed very successful
or a complete failure
...

Despite the relative importance of this, not all BI initiatives have
executive level sponsorship
...
As shown in Figure 6-2,
89
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


90

Chapter 6

Importance of Organizational Aspects to BI Success
IT and business partnership

3
...
34

Alignment with business goals

3
...
11

Company culture fosters fact-based decision-making

2
...
96

BI projects are appropriately funded

2
...
74

Effective BI Steering Committee

2
...
28

Quality and expertise of external consultants

2
...
00

1
...
00
Degree of Importance

3
...
00

4-Essential 3-Very important 2-Important 1-Not very important

Figure 6-1 Executive support is one of the most important aspects to successful BI
...


91

Executive Support

the impact on a project’s success is noticeable: of the companies who
describe their BI projects as being very successful, 89% have executive
sponsorship, whereas in the projects described as a failure only 37% had
executive sponsorship
...
The CIO is most often (in 35%
of projects) the sponsor of a BI initiative, followed by the CEO (20%)
...

Figure 6-3 shows the relationship between the sponsoring executive and
Executive Sponsors & BI Success
100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

43%

20%

31%

29%

28%

26%
21%

10%

0%

Chief Executive
Officer (CEO)

Chief Operating
Officer (COO)

Marketing VP

Chief Financial
Officer (CFO)

Other Line of
Business Leader

Chief Information
Officer (CIO) or IT
Manager

BI Success?
Failure
Moderately Successful
Very Successful

Figure 6-3 The CEO as the BI sponsor has the highest rate of BI success
...
The portion of companies who have the CEO as their sponsor and classify their project as being
very successful is 43%
...
Contrast this with the portion of companies
who have the CIO as the sponsor and describe the project as very successful at only 21%, slightly lower than the average
...
While it’s not
good news that the CIO is not necessarily an ideal sponsor, the problem
is not with the individual executive per se but rather with the degree of
influence the CIO wields with the business
...

Public relations firm Burson Marsteller has been tracking the role
of CIOs on boards of directors and executive committees for several
years
...
2%
higher annual returns than relevant indices
...

There is, however, a difference between membership on a board of
directors and in being an active member of the company’s executive or
operating committee
...
A 2007 eSurvey by Optimize Magazine found that 34% of
CIOs were actively involved in driving major business decisions and
another 45% are at least consulted on these decisions
...


Ultimately, the most effective sponsor for a business intelligence initiative is the individual who understands the full value of business intelligence and who wields influence, instills credibility, and fosters trust
with all of the business and functional executives
...
Both the BI team and the

Executive Support

93

The Changing Role of the CIO
The role of the CIO is undergoing a transformation in many
companies
...
In the past, CIOs may have been
viewed only as the technology keepers and data center managers
...
If the CIO’s role is
largely left to overseeing maintenance of systems, this type of
CIO is not an ideal sponsor for a business intelligence initiative, as BI is less about technology and more about business
...
Conversely, if the CEO does not value or understand information technology, the CEO may not want someone
on the business team who can make him or her feel stupid
...
Thus,
a CEO who is already less than conversant in technology, does
not want to demonstrate further public weakness (or possibly be
humiliated) concerning IT should he or she fail to understand
what the CIO is talking about (even though that may be entirely
the CIO’s fault)
...
When the IT department had greater ownership of business
intelligence, BI usage was low, numbers were inconsistently reported, and
there was no measurable impact on business performance
...
Swapping out tools, reducing head count, and changing reporting lines would not have been possible without that executive
level sponsorship
...
No individual function or
business unit could take a “not invented here” attitude
...
Although he was not the
original sponsor of Corporate Express’ BI revitalization, he quickly saw the
value of the initiative and is now a champion for the effort
...
A European
data warehouse was only just being implemented
...

He found business intelligence in the United States to be years ahead of
what the company had in Europe
...
”

Expect Changes in Sponsorship
The executive sponsor for a BI initiative may change throughout the
BI life cycle
...
In some
cases, the change was pivotal in moving BI from mediocrity to success
...
For
all the case study companies, while there is one designated sponsor, there
is widespread support for business intelligence at the executive level
...


Emergency Medical
Associates

CTO and vision from CEO

(same)

FlightStats

CEO

(same)

Norway Post

IT initiative

CFO

Table 6-1 Executive level sponsors at Successful BI Case Studies

Executive Support

95

Getting Executive Buy-In
While most recognize the importance of executive level support for BI,
getting that support can be difficult
...
Business intelligence is a never-ending
initiative, but that doesn’t mean working endlessly without delivering
business value
...
Another
issue is getting all levels of management to ‘get it’ as they tend to lack
the big picture
...
” At this company, the BI team tried the “guerilla
marketing as long as we could, but without executive level support, we
got nowhere
...

Some have it easier than others
...
In many cases, however, executive support has
to be earned, even re-earned
...

Manage expectations
...


Demonstrate Small Successes
When you have completed a successful project—however small you
must start—you will earn the trust and support of whichever executive benefits from that first project
...

As an example, ENECO Energie is one of the top three gas and
electricity suppliers in the Netherlands
...
According to Ton van den Dungen, manager,
Business Intelligence Center of Excellence, the attitude was “There
is not one successful BI project
...
” So in 2003, with

96

Chapter 6

an entrepreneurial approach, ENECO’s initial BI project consisted of
manual extracts from source systems and Microsoft Excel Pivot Tables
...
The pilot cost only 350,000 euros (EUR) and helped
ENECO save 4 million EUR ($5 million)
...

ENECO’s initiative demonstrates a key secret to success: successful
BI companies start their BI initiative with or without executive sponsorship
...
Success at this early stage has to be
measured in hard business benefits
...


Use the measurable business benefits that leading companies describe
throughout this book—improved patient care, faster synergies following
a merger, increased customer satisfaction, immediate sales lift, cost reductions in advertising campaigns—to inspire conversations with your
executives on how your company can exploit business intelligence
...
Never overpromise and underdeliver
...
Communicate clearly that the BI deployment
will not be scaled up or out without an executive champion
...
A BI project manager for a medical center expressed frustration:
All the BI vendors come in and show these executives a bunch of
eye-candy and make it sound easy, when it’s not
...
The BI vendors set us up for
failure
...
The executive has no idea how their staff gets the
numbers, the manual processes, the data manipulation
...
Nobody has a handle on what it
costs to do manually and how vulnerable they are
...
If you currently lack executive level sponsorship, ask the
sought-for sponsor: “How much time do you spend in meetings arguing
about the numbers?” Find out the degree of pain and frustration
...
People argued
about the numbers, and nobody agreed on the reality
...
“After
we implemented MicroStrategy, we didn’t argue about the numbers, and
there was just support for what is the performance and then identifying
the business opportunities
...

How you frame the frustration is important
...
The focus has to be on the degree of frustration
and that business intelligence—done well—can relieve that frustration
and provide measurable business value
...


is killing us, and business intelligence can

For example: “The time we spend debating numbers (frustration) is a
problem, and business intelligence can provide a single set of numbers and
allow us to focus more on innovation (benefits)
...
”

The Role of an Executive Sponsor
Executive sponsors support the BI effort in the following ways:
■

■

■
■
■

Articulate commitment to the initiative and to the impact it will have
on the organization
...
They may help craft this vision
...

Clear political barriers
...

Such issues are rarely technical in nature and more often involve prioritization, organizational issues, and project scope
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
Executive support is one of the most important secrets to successful BI
and the degree to which BI contributes to business performance
...
Executive support
is not guaranteed and is something that must be earned
...

The sponsoring executive may change throughout the BI life cycle
...


If you have been diligently following all the other best practices in
this book and still don’t have executive level support, face the harsh reality that your company may never fully appreciate the value of business
intelligence without exogenous change
...

Successful business intelligence is influenced by both technical
aspects and organizational aspects
...
And yet, even if you do everything right from an organizational perspective, if you don’t have high
quality, relevant data, your BI initiative will fail
...
Each pillar within the data architecture is important, with data quality being the most important
...
Forty-six percent of survey respondents rated this
item as essential to a successful BI deployment
...
IT professionals should find this rating encouraging
as there is a widely held belief that business users do not consider data
quality to be as important as sexy BI tools, query performance, and other,
more visible aspects of business intelligence
...
It’s often perceived as being a
problem for IT to handle when it’s not: it’s for the business to own and
correct
...

99
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


Chapter 7

NS

GRANULARITY

BREADTH

RELEVANCE

L S & A P P L I C AT I O

TIMELINESS

TOO
BI

QUALITY

100

Figure 7-1 The data architecture is the foundation for successful business
intelligence
...
In the short term, bandaging problems rather than addressing the root causes is often the
path of least resistance
...
1 Initially, I thought his comments were
hyperbole, framed to garner readership interest
...
As an example, he notes that 96,000
Importance of Technical Aspects to BI Success
Data quality - clean data

3
...
18

Availability of relevant subject areas

3
...
02

Fast query response time

2
...
79

Incorporation of BI into operational processes

2
...
13
0
...
00

2
...
00

4
...


D Is for Data

101

hospital patients die each year from errors arising out of poor data
quality
...
5 trillion or more
...
3 In a TDWI survey, more than half of respondents
said their company has suffered losses, problems, and costs due to poorquality data
...
As business user Eric Bachenheimer,
director of client account management at Emergency Medical Associates
(EMA) describes, “If you don’t have trust or faith in your data, you’re
dead in the water
...
”
Early in EMA’s business intelligence deployment, there was little data
governance
...
Ultimately, the cause of the
data quality problems was not because of the ETL process, or the way
data was modeled in the data warehouse or represented in the reports:
it was because two hospitals submitted data in the source system differently
...
Getting
businesspeople to understand the issues that affect data integrity can be
a slow process
...

Jonathan Rothman, director of data management, describes, “I’m trying
to get the business to take ownership over data validation as well as taking
ownership over providing the data warehouse quality, error free data
...
A client in
the oil and gas industry had significant data quality problems following
the merger of multiple companies
...

When business users wanted to report information by bill of lading—a
fairly important and routine way of tracking materials—they couldn’t
...
Getting anyone to be held accountable
for making bill of lading mandatory and entered in a consistent place
required executive level support and organizational change, neither of
which was possible at the time
...
The data warehouse team refused to
change the ETL process because it violated their principle of correcting
data quality issues in the source systems
...

Learn from this company’s lesson: You can only report on what is
captured—and captured consistently and accurately
...
BI usage increased as users slowly gained confidence in the integrity of the data warehouse
...

When Dow first began its business intelligence effort 14 years ago
in 1993, SAP was a newly implemented ERP system that forced many of
the work processes to change
...
Using Six Sigma as a way of measuring data
quality, Dow at the time was a 1
...
5 There were a number
of hiccups from the reengineering efforts and bad data in the system as
each business entered data into SAP slightly differently, based on their
distinct requirements
...
“When we design work processes, we don’t design governance around the work processes, and yet
it impacts information management and delivery in the data warehouse
...
”
As a result, the CEO and CIO promoted Costa to corporate director
of quality process & architecture, continuing to give him control over
the data warehouse, but in addition, giving him authority to change the
operational processes that affect the full business intelligence life cycle
...
”
—Mike Costa, former corporate director of quality process &
architecture, The Dow Chemical Company

D Is for Data

103

His role was separate from any individual function, work process, or
business unit
...
9 to 6
...
9
...
Whereas many management strategies focus on
quality by monitoring the number of defects after the fact, Six Sigma
focuses on the processes that lead to the defects
...
”6 The higher the sigma level, the less likely the
process will lead to defects
...
5 to 4 range
...
92 per 1,000 as of June
20078)
...
5 to 4 sigma level
...

The Cost of Quality
Sigma Level

Defects per Million
Opportunities

Cost of Quality

2

308,537 (Noncompetitive companies) Not applicable

3

66,807

25–40% of sales

4

6,210 (Industry average)

15–25% of sales

5

233

5–15% of sales

6

3
...

Source: Harry, Mikel, Schroeder, Richard, Six Sigma: The Breakthrough Management
Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations, Doubleday: 2000, page 17
...
As the preceding table illustrates, the move in data quality
in the data warehouse from a 1
...
9 is significant
...
He advises Fortune 10 companies on ways to improve data quality and operational processes
...
Norway Post, for example, has seven different
general ledger systems
...
Prior to implementing a
common data warehouse, users would do manual extracts into over 6,000
different Excel spreadsheets
...

Seven years ago, as part of its performance management initiative,
Norway Post phased out the manual, multiple extracts and made the
common data warehouse the point of access for reports, plans, and statistical analysis (see Figure 7-4)
...
Based
Management

Reporting
from OLAP

Reporting
from
Database

Statistical
Application

(Data
Mining)

Analytic
Applications

OLAP
OLAP
Cubes

Data
Warehouse
Platform

Metadata

Operational Data Store

Data Warehouse

Data Integration
(ETL, …)

Source Systems

Files

System 1

DataPorpagate

Services Oriented
Access Data Layer
…

System n

eConnect
Data Hub

Ground Data
Grunndata

MDM

Figure 7-4 Norway Post’s Integrated Performance Management System
(reprinted with permission)

architecture, the company has begun the process of phasing out
multiple, custom general-ledger systems to replace them with Oracle
business applications
...
FlightStats collects data from
multiple data sources: government sources such as the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA), airports, and global distribution systems such as
Sabre, Apollo, and Amadeus
...
For
example, some data sources report aircraft positional information while
others report gate data or runway data
...
So, for example, if you are flying from New York to Australia,
there may be two flight records: one that comes from Continental
Airlines for the New York to Los Angeles route and a second one that
comes from Qantas for the Los Angeles to Melbourne leg
...
FlightStats will
merge the information on these events that come from multiple, disparate data sources into a single flight history record for each leg
...
For example, if a flight is delayed and crosses
over the end of day, there are now two records for the same day, airline,

106

Chapter 7

and flight number
...
It’s been an iterative, three-year process to understand the
data nuances, achieve a high level of data quality, and apply consistent
business definitions
...
Customers can access both the real-time data warehouse and the
historical data warehouse, depending on their information needs
...
Even when data is correctly entered and accurate,
differences in business definitions can cause problems
...
Instead, it’s simply a matter of definition
...
S
...
They had more
than 33 different definitions for “customer churn
...
IT
can only implement those business definitions
...
There are two predominant
philosophies advocated by data warehouse visionaries, sometimes
referred to as the fathers of data warehousing, Bill Inmon and Ralph
Kimball
...
In simple terms, Inmon advocates
storing the data in granular, normalized form once, with relevant data
marts (whether a subset or aggregate of the detailed data) modeled off
the normalized data model
...
Kimball,
meanwhile, advocates using star schemas as a business presentation
layer, referred to as the “data mart bus architecture
...
Research from professors Thilini
Ariyachandra (University of Cincinnati) and Hugh Watson (University
of Georgia) is one of the few studies that have looked at the degree

D Is for Data

107

to which approach is more successful
...
Both deployment approaches showed equal degrees of success
...

The survey did not, however, look at who uses a combination of
either approach, something that Dan Linstedt, chief technology officer
for Myers-Holum, most often encounters
...
12 He will use the Kimball dimensional approach when there is
a single source system and for the presentation layer
...
The commitment to staging the data this way has allowed Continental to ensure
consistency and reusability, while also providing flexibility for all the
departments and business applications that access the data warehouse
...
In practice, I can attest that a
poorly designed data model, particularly one that business users access,
can prevent users from asking and answering their business questions
with any degree of ease, and sometimes, not at all
...


Master Data Management (MDM)
Master data management seems to be the latest buzz in the BI industry
(see Chapter 2 for an explanation of MDM)
...

There are different types of master data: product, customer, region,
facility location, and chart of accounts, to name a few
...
The
order entry system used a different set of customer codes from the
invoice system
...
Often, custom
transaction systems will devise their own codes
...

Note: With an integrated ERP system, the number of distinct codes is
reduced only by the degree to which disparate code tables have been
eliminated
...
In other words, you
may still have multiple records for the same customer (“Howson” and
“Howsin,” for example), but those records are stored in one system
...
The customer number, 123, from the order entry system
is used
...
The
customer number in the invoice system (I456) is different from that in
the order system and includes an alphabetical character
...
In the absence of common
code files or a master data management system, the data warehouse
team is left to define its own coding system (see Figure 7-5)
...

In Figure 7-5, a common customer code—989—for Preferred
Purchasing is implemented as part of the extract, transform, and load
process, to allow users to analyze data by customer regardless of which
transaction system the data originated in
...
Preferred Purchasing may have hundreds of locations around the world
...
If a user
wants to understand global purchases by all the locations around the
world, then these regional and global rollups must be maintained
...
Increasingly, MDM experts advocate
storing master data management separately and allowing both the transaction systems and data warehouse to access it
...
As shown
in Figure 7-6, master data is created in INCA
...
Information is then extracted into the data warehouse
...
Dow recognizes
its global codes as an ingredient to its successful use of business intelligence, particularly on a global basis
...
“It is a lost child that nobody wants
...
It’s so behind the scenes that nobody understands the
value
...


Single system of record for each master data object, controlled
distribution and replication via consistent publish and subscribe rules
...


Distribution

Master Data
Management

ERP
CRM
HR

Data (Hub)
Warehouse

PLM
Other…

Transaction systems add
“localized data” to the
enterprise common data
...


Figure 7-6 The Dow Chemical Company’s MDM strategy13 (reprinted with
permission)

110

Chapter 7

Right-Time Data
In business intelligence’s infancy, data warehouses were updated on
a monthly, sometimes weekly, basis
...
The update to the data warehouse may be seconds behind
transaction system updates, or minutes or hours, whatever best serves
the business requirements
...
15
While much of right-time business intelligence is about supporting
operational decision-making, the timeliness of updates also increasingly
allows decision makers to take swift action on strategic and tactical decisions
...

More timely updates allow for more timely insight and corrective action
...
16 It wasn’t until
six months later when the data warehouse moved to updates every
15 minutes that senior executives embraced the system
...
Spikes in the number of inbound calls to the call center
act as an early warning system for an upcoming increased load in the
distribution center
...
Richard Hackathorn, founder of Bolder Technology, talks about
three components of data latency that affect decision making:17
■

■

■

Capture latency is the time it takes between a business event happening and a piece of data being captured in a source system to
when that data has been extracted into the business intelligence
architecture
...
Such dissemination and analysis may be in the form of a dashboard update, an alert, or a report
refresh
...


Hackathorn suggests that reducing this data latency reduces the
time to action
...
Measuring that business value is important in determining how much it costs to reduce data latency
...

As an example, some of the data that FlightStats acquires is publicly available from the Department of Transportation
...
Perhaps it is timely enough for corporations
to negotiate preferred airlines or to support Congress’s debate on the
need for a Passenger Bill of Rights, but it is not timely enough for
individual consumers or travel agents to act upon
...
Travel
agents who subscribe to FlightStats data will receive an alert for a
delayed or canceled flight so that passengers with connecting flights
can be rebooked proactively while still mid-air on the delayed flight
...
Therefore,
FlightStats can charge for the access to the real-time flight information as there is business value in reducing decision latency
...
”18
In the Successful BI Survey, near real-time updates to the data warehouse were rated only important on average (below essential or very important in Figure 7-2)
...


Value Lost

Value

Business Event

Capture
Latency

Data Ready for Analysis
Analysis
Latency

Information Delivered
Decision
Latency
Action Time

Action Taken

Time

Figure 7-7 The benefit of reducing latency (Copyright Bolder Technology, Inc
...
Mike Pekala, a finance director and power user at Dow,
cautions, “having even daily data at times is a burden versus a benefit
...
There are times
when real-time data causes issues because people do not understand the
underlying details
...
”

Data Quality’s Chicken and Egg
Given just how difficult it is to achieve data quality and how far the
industry is from addressing the root causes of data quality, it begs the
question: what do you do first?
Fix the data and then strive for business intelligence?
or
Deliver business intelligence tools on top of messy data and later
fix the data as you go?
This would sound like a no-brainer
...
The business sponsors don’t understand why the data quality is so bad and may not be in
a position to address the root causes
...
It
would seem that the BI team is being set up for failure
...
At issue is, when is the data good enough? A second issue is that until the consequences of multiple, disparate systems
with messy codes, inconsistent business definitions, and incorrect data
entry are exposed to the business via BI tools, there is little incentive to
address the root causes
...


Communicate loudly and widely where there are data quality problems
and the associated risks with deploying BI tools on top of bad data
...
Complaining without providing recommendations fixes nothing
...
Use Figure 7-8 as
a way of determining where your company is on the continuum of best
practices for data quality
...
Without a reasonable degree of confidence in the
data quality, BI should be kept in the hands of knowledge workers and
not extended to frontline workers and certainly not to customers and
suppliers
...
Don’t wait

Threats to Data Quality

Best Practices to Improving

• Multiple, disparate transaction systems

• Common ERP system

• Incompatible codes

• MDM separate from transaction
and BI systems

• Codes and hierarchies siloed within each
transaction system

• Consistent business definitions

• Disagreement on business definitions

• Data quality measured

• Degree of data quality problems unknown

• Data governance in place

• No accountability for data ownership
• Data needed for analysis not captured
• Lack of data profiling tools

Figure 7-8 A continuum toward data quality

114

Chapter 7

for every last data quality issue to be resolved; if you do, you will never
deliver any BI capabilities, business users will never see the problem,
and quality will never improve
...
Fail to build an information architecture that is flexible, with consistent, timely, quality data, and your BI
initiative will fail
...
However, sometimes it
takes displaying that messy data to get business users to understand
the importance of data quality and to take ownership of a problem that
extends beyond business intelligence, to the source systems and to the
organizational structures that govern a company’s data
...

Ensure the source systems capture what you want to report and
analyze
...

Separate master data from transactional and business intelligence
systems
...

Review organizational structures to determine who owns the data and
can ensure its integrity
...

Evaluate increasing the timeliness of data warehouse updates against
the business value provided
...

However, the degree to which the business and IT can partner together
is the single most important organizational aspect to successful business
intelligence (see Chapter 6, Figure 6-1)
...
For the sake of
successful business intelligence, then, opposites better attract!

Voices of Frustration
In the successful BI survey, respondents from both the business side
and IT side expressed frustration with one another, regardless if their
BI deployment was a failure or a success
...
”
—A hybrid business-IT person from a major insurance company
“IT is the main reason why our BI effort failed
...
‘It’s an Information Systems problem
...
Just give me the answer
...
Click here for terms of use
...

There is no realization on the part of the business as to how they affect
timelines and implementations
...
S
...
Information Systems must understand the
business and be involved in what they are trying to achieve
...
,
who describes their BI project as very successful
The frustration and divide between the business and IT has ramifications far beyond business intelligence
...
As both sides blame one another, a key secret to reducing
blame and increasing understanding is to recognize how these two sides
are different
...
1 The yang—the white portion of the symbol—represents movement, initiative, heat, and fire
...
The yin-yang is a
good symbol for the business-IT relationship because while it does
reflect opposites, it is said the yin-yang also conveys “balance” and “a
duality that can not exist without both parts
...
The differences are
not absolute
...
They are archetypes, and as with any archetype there are
exceptions, but I would suspect that if each group of professionals were
given a personality test, consistent traits would emerge
...
An IT person, on the other hand, would prefer to
fire off an e-mail, avoiding direct interaction (and providing documentation on the disagreement)
...
The prospect of doing this might cause heart palpitations for
an IT professional—the risks and lack of a systematic approach are overwhelming
...

Business Person Archetype

IT Professional Archetype

Extrovert

Introvert

Sociable

Solitary

Freewheeling

Methodical, systematic, disciplined

Risk taking

Risk averse

Prefers face-to-face meetings

Minimal face-to-face communication
...


In reviewing drafts of this chapter, I and my technical editor were
concerned that my proposed archetypes would offend some readers
...
So I turned to one of the most widely used
personality tests: Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI)
...

Perception: Sensing types (S) prefer to deal with reality whereas intuitive (I) types are more imaginative and future-focused
Judgement: Thinkers (T) are more objective and logical in assessing
a situation whereas feelers (F) are people who will judge a situation
more by how people are affected
World Orientation: Judging (J) personality types like structure in their
world whereas perceiving (P) types are more spontaneous, flexible,
and thrive on change
...
The IT archetype is more introverted,
thinking, and judging or an ITJ personality type
...
I don’t think the
personality extremes for perception (sensing or S and intuitive or I) are
distinguishing characteristics in the business and IT archetypes
...
Sure enough, ITJ types (which corresponds to my IT archetype) more often choose technical careers; and a
career as a computer operator or systems analyst appears at the top of the
list for this personality type
...
5
This is not to say that you won’t find an EFP type in IT, or an ITJ
type as a business user; it simply means that the distinct personality types
are indeed more prevalent in each role (think the larger black area of the
yin-yang versus the small black circle)
...

Despite the MBTI research, some may still dismiss these differences
in work styles and personalities as stereotypes
...
In many companies, the business is motivated and rewarded for behavior that increases
revenue
...
IT meanwhile is often
rewarded for cutting costs and providing a stable IT environment, where
risk is discouraged
...
You can’t
swap out systems on a regular basis and expect the company to continue
to operate
...

IT people should be rewarded for being responsive to business requests that improve business performance
...


The Business-IT Partnership

119

Meet the Hybrid Business-IT Person
One way in which business and IT people are bridging the gap is by
cultivating hybrid business-IT people
...
They may
not be programmers or system engineers, but they speak enough of the
IT language to translate business needs, opportunities, and requirements in ways that IT traditionalists understand
...
As described in
the Chapter 1 section on the Successful BI survey, 23% of the survey
respondents describe themselves as hybrid business-IT persons
...
Hybrid business-IT persons understand the business and how to leverage technology to improve the business
...


I would also describe myself as one of these hybrids
...
While I excelled at math, computer science
at the time was not the place for women, so I pursued my other passion:
writing
...
When the university network kept crashing,
I had to find innovative ways to recover corrupted files (what—retype an
entire paper?!?!?) and discovered the world of personal computers and
local area networks
...

Dow Chemical was my second job out of college, and in an unusual
twist, I was hired directly by a business unit (not the information systems department) to fill a newly created role as a business systems specialist
...
(I only later learned all the political consequences of this
unusual reporting line
...
When we wanted a local area network, I defined

120

Chapter 8

the requirements, bought the system, and installed it
...

The hydrocarbons business even went so far as to buy our own meeting
scheduler (pre–Microsoft Outlook) and to build an integrated transaction system (pre-SAP)
...
Describing the dynamics as an “us
versus them” mentality was an understatement
...
It was
rewarding, exciting, challenging, and offered absolutely no career progression
...
It was my first glimpse into the “other
side,” though, of being a cost center and of having to satisfy the greatest
common denominator of not one, but 15 different business units and
multiple functions
...
Overnight, I had
become a “them
...
In hydrocarbons, the technology investments
were approved by a business team when something sounded reasonable
enough
...
I was
out of my league
...
Through the Global
Reporting Project, I learned the discipline within information systems
that is necessary when building solutions for thousands of users; in
hydrocarbons, the users were fewer than 200
...
For the Global Reporting
Project, two of the initial subject areas included a product income
statement and a business balance sheet
...
So I did what any stubborn
person, determined to understand the purpose in all this would do: I
quit my career of eight years, left the company that I referred to as my
“extended family,” and pursued my MBA, albeit with a focus on information systems
...
Do you align more with the business or with IT? What is clear is that such hybrid people benefit from
indoctrination and training in both disciplines
...
The
importance of this dual skill set is most apparent at the CIO level (see
Chapter 6)
...
6 However, it is also important at lower levels and,
I would advocate, at any intersecting points in which businesspeople and
IT people must communicate directly with one another
...
The operative word is ‘committed
...
Nor does it mean that the IT personnel can
approach the business with a degree of wariness
...
As 1-800 CONTACTS described their business-IT
partnership, Jim Hill, the data warehouse manager says, “We are equal
partners with the call center
...
What do you think?’…If the business feels they are a partner in solution, you get the desired results
...
“The IT people in the data warehouse team understand the
call center so well, they could probably take some calls
...
I’ve never felt an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mentality
...
’”
The first step to building such a partnership is to recognize its
importance in successful business intelligence
...

Some specific things that both the business and IT can do to
develop a stronger partnership:
Develop an understanding of each other Recognize the different
personalities, work approaches, and constraints under which each
works
...
For IT, this may
mean greater recognition of why a timely delivery is so critical to the
livelihood of the business (see the section on enterprise versus departmental BI in Chapter 11)
...

Ban the technobabble! IT people tend to overuse acronyms
...
You wouldn’t
speak a foreign language in a room otherwise filled with only Englishspeaking colleagues, so don’t revert to technobabble
...
Practice an elevator
pitch that describes briefly what business intelligence is all about in
business terms
...

This might include a personality assessment such as the Myers-Briggs
Type Indicator so that team members recognize and understand people’s
unique motivators and styles of working
...
For IT people, it’s important that the goals are not only related to
cost containment, but also to business enablement
...
Consider
alternative organizational structures that provide the appropriate partnership and balance for fulfilling career paths, shared resources, knowledge

The Business-IT Partnership

123

sharing, and expertise as they relate to business intelligence
...

These organizational aspects are discussed further in Chapter 11
...
IT personnel should study the company’s mission statement as well as individual
business unit plans
...
The IT department sits with themselves, and businesspeople sit with each other—that is, when people
even eat lunch together! It is an unfortunate situation that lunchtime,
particularly in the United States, is often relegated to a quick sandwich
eaten in isolation at one’s desk
...


Alignment
While business alignment and business partnership are closely related,
they are not the same thing
...
The business intelligence initiative must support the
company’s or business unit’s objectives, whether to be a low-cost provider, best in class service, and so on
...
In some cases, they
aren’t
...
In this case, IT and that
particular business unit may be working as partners, but they are not
aligned
...
”8 Partnership is a commitment to
achieving this synergy
...
In this way, the business sees IT as a trusted partner to ensure that technology is considered

124

Chapter 8

in developing a business’s strategic direction, and IT delivers an architecture and set of services consistent with this direction (see Figure 8-1)
...
The CIO of Westchester County, New York, says, “Too
often, the phrase ‘aligning IT with the business’ implies that IT must
breathlessly run to catch up with the business as it goes in whatever
direction someone else has determined
...
”9
Continental’s Go Forward Plan, discussed in Chapter 5, is a good
example of how IT and the business and functional users were aligned
to achieve an amazing turnaround
...
The Go Forward Plan has provided us a practical,
measurable and flexible way to get all of our co-workers in our huddle
and communicate the direction we want to take the Company
...
11 To
achieve this, all the employees had to be working in the same direction,
aligned with the Go Forward Plan
...
12 Figure 8-2
shows how Continental’s business intelligence initiatives were aligned
with the company’s strategic plan
...
In
this way, Mike Costa, former corporate director of quality process and
architecture at Dow Chemical, cautions, “The strategy of the company
can change overnight
...
”13 The same technology and architecture Dow established in
1994, when it first began the Global Reporting Project, continues to be
used today
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
The business IT partnership is one of the most important aspects in
succeeding with business intelligence
...


126
■

■

■

■

■

Chapter 8

If you feel like the other side seldom understands you, has a radically
different way of working, and is motivated by different forces, then
congratulate yourself for recognizing some significant differences
...

Recruit and develop hybrid business-IT personnel to play a pivotal role
in your BI effort
...

Align the vision and deliverables for business intelligence with the
goals of the company and individual business units that BI serves
...
I don’t know who first coined this phrase
...
Phil McGraw (of initial Oprah fame) wrote an article by this title
for National Review
...
I have heard this phrase shouted by a recent divorcee
to another woman who committed the social “error” of being civil to the
ex-husband
...
” Or to be politically correct, Relevance with a capital R
...
Pertinence to the matter at hand
...
The capability of an information retrieval system to
select and retrieve data suitable for a user’s needs
...
Instead,
they deliver tailored applications relevant to the intended user
...

In most companies, inside staff such as call center agents don’t
use business intelligence (as shown in Chapter 4, Figure 4-5, only
28% of inside staff use BI)
...
Their information requirements are somewhat
predictable
...


127
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


128

Chapter 9

Relevance Brings Clearer Vision
At 1-800 CONTACTS, prior to the BI application, call center agents
were frustrated with inadequate information access (see the section on
frustration in Chapter 5)
...
Agents were paid commissions on a number of performance
measures, but these measures were only available via a piece of paper
posted on the wall the next day—too late, too aggregated, too inaccessible to be actionable
...
The BI team worked
side by side with the agents to the extent that the team could even handle
an incoming call
...
Call center managers thought this would
be a big win for the agents
...
Executives wanted to tap into their competitive nature
to drive better performance
...
1 By increasing the dashboard update to refresh every
15 minutes, it would allow agents to take action that same day
...
The top bar within each of these
displays shows the individual agent performance
...
The subsequent team and
call center bars show just how far ahead or behind the agent is versus
his or her peers
...
The very week that the new
dashboard went live, there was a measurable lift in sales
...
Over the years, the company has amassed a lot
of information on how customers behave, such as when they are most
likely to need a prescription refill, how often they return, and their lifetime value
...


Relevance

129

Figure 9-1 1-800 CONTACTS agent key performance indicators (Copyright 1-800 CONTACTS
...
)

130

Chapter 9

Relevance Improves Patient Care
Emergency Medical Associates described a similar story of relevance
...
Some of this data originates
in emergency rooms
...
In fall 2004,
the United States faced a shortage of flu vaccine after one of the main
vaccine manufacturers in Britain was forced to suspend manufacturing
due to contamination issues at the plant
...
While EMA
routinely sends such data to a number of reporting authorities including
local health officials and the Centers for Disease Control,3 the ability to
analyze the data, predict the outbreak, and graphically show the most
affected areas at the hospital level was exceptional
...

Another way that doctors use business intelligence to improve
patient care is by improving emergency room operations so that staffing
levels and patient wait times are optimal
...
The BI team
did not follow the traditional requirements gathering process of going to
the doctors and asking “what do you want?” Doctors, like most potential
business intelligence users, don’t know what they want until they see
it and may not know what is even possible with information technology
...
So
he learned the businesses by interviewing and collaborating with doctors, hospital administrators, and other stakeholders on the dynamics
of the emergency room
...
For some patients, it’s a matter of
life and death
...
In the
United States, ER wait times average 3 hours and 42 minutes
...
While this indicator
was acknowledged by all the stakeholders as being important, it was not
one that was routinely tracked or that could be proven to impact care and

Relevance

131

finances
...

The reports evolved into a series of dashboards shown in Figure 9-2
...
Visual indicators at
the bottom of the dashboard allow decision-makers to focus on certain
metrics and to drill down into specific time periods
...
11% for the period
...

Appropriate staffing levels in emergency rooms are particularly difficult to determine: by definition, emergencies are not scheduled events,
and yet, with all the data available, EMA can discern trends to be more
proactive
...
Changing registration procedures and the layout of the emergency room can also bring faster treatment
...
Findings show that optimum staffing level and admittance
procedures are important, so another dashboard provides a metric on
patient satisfaction displayed next to the number of patients treated
per hour
...
By giving hospital administrators and doctors access to this information, EMA has been able to reduce the ER
wait time by 50% in some cases
...
As EMA shared their story of BI success with me, I couldn’t help
thinking, “in an emergency, patients have no choice
...
” While the reduced ER wait times clearly affect
patient satisfaction and care, I was skeptical that there was any connection to ER financials
...
) A friend,
who just happens to be a somewhat frequent visitor of emergency
rooms, enlightened me
...
Her nearest emergency room is
about 20 minutes away
...
Reprinted with permission
...
She has visited at least three other area ERs
...

Two days later, when the pain would not subside, Dale took her son to
a specialist
...
“I would rather drive further, get seen faster, and have my children better sooner than go to one of these other hospitals
...
Instead, for non-life-threatening
emergencies, patients will indeed go to the most efficient hospital with
the best reputation for quality care
...
At EMA, business intelligence has
wide support at senior levels and across the company
...
While BI is still important to the finance department,
EMA prioritized finance users as one of the later adopters
...


Relevance to Continental Gate Agents
Gate agents may not be whom you picture when you think of a typical
business intelligence user, and yet, business intelligence is an important
tool for gate agents at Continental Airlines
...
When the seats have not been
sold, complimentary upgrades are offered to people who have purchased
higher-fare tickets and to Continental’s most frequent fliers—OnePass
Elite members
...
If
a OnePass Elite member hoping for an upgrade boards the plane and sees
the empty business class seats, it creates potential for dissatisfaction
...
At the time of the check-in, if the business class
cabin is not full and predicted to remain that way, a OnePass Elite member is automatically offered an upgrade to business class
...
Customers are given incentives to
check in online such as receiving extra frequent flier miles
...
So if a business class passenger
doesn’t show up—say they missed a connecting flight, got stuck in traffic
en route to the airport, or had a last-minute change of plans—then a seat
is now available for an Elite upgrade
...
Under
extreme pressure to ensure an on-time departure, with planes booked to
capacity, and 100 other things that demand immediate attention, offering
this free upgrade to an unsuspecting passenger may not be high on the
list of priorities for the gate agent
...
9 For gate agents to
provide this service, it has to be incredibly easy both to recognize that the
business class seat is empty as well as to identify to which Elite passenger
the upgrade should be offered
...
10 In this way, business intelligence plays two roles—first in the operational task of identifying
which passengers should receive the upgrade and then later in monitoring
the key performance indicator of flying with a full business class cabin
...
The authors of Freakonomics write, “Experts are humans,
and humans respond to incentives
...
For example, real estate agents may not always sell a house for
the highest price (the seller’s desired result), but rather, in a way that
maximizes their net commission (the real estate agent’s incentive)
...
One responded, quite seriously,

Relevance

135

“just using business intelligence is its own reward!”(He is one of the
enthusiastic users of BI who was previously starved for data and BI
tools)
...
Financial
compensation, however, is only one form of incentive, and other forms
of incentives in this idea of relevance are
■
■

■

A desire to win, or to outperform their colleagues
A desire to do a better job, whether to improve patient care or customer
satisfaction
A sense of happiness or removal of frustration that information they
struggled to access and compile before has been made significantly
easier to access

There are a number of barriers to BI success, and individual resistance to change is one of them
...
While I have encountered companies
who use specific incentives to encourage BI use, a better approach is
to integrate business intelligence into achieving a level of performance
that is tied to an existing incentive
...
Personalization
goes beyond simply matching the BI tool with the user segment as discussed in Chapter 12
...

Row-level security is one approach to personalizing the data
...
For example, at 1-800 CONTACTS, a given call
center agent can see only his or her individual performance in the
dashboard shown earlier in Figure 9-1
...
This kind of personalization
can be a challenge to implement when data is extracted from multiple
systems and aggregated
...
Somewhere the relationship between call center managers and
the particular agents has to be established to provide personalization on
this aggregated data
...
As this is still an emerging capability, many
BI administrators are forced to develop their own personalization
approaches whether in the physical data warehouse or in the BI tools
...
The former emphasizes data restrictions for the purposes of
improving relevancy; the latter is about preventing people from seeing
information not pertinent to their jobs
...
Neil Raden, founder
of Hired Brains, has written about the issues that unnecessary data
restrictions can cause
...
“In many BI implementations, every
user of the system is restricted to the data they are allowed to see
...
The eastern region sales manager is unable to see
how the western region sales manager is doing with respect to a certain
kind of sale and thus, deprived of potentially valuable insight
...


Requirements-Driven BI
A commonly held opinion for successful business intelligence is that it
should be requirements driven: the users define their requirements, and
the BI team builds a solution according to those specifications
...
The requirements
were not explicitly defined by the users at all
...
These BI experts didn’t have a “build it

Relevance

137

and they will come” mentality, nor did they “build what was asked for”;
instead, they studied the activities of these potential users and delivered
something that would benefit the individuals
...
Knowledge workers may
have a better idea of what data and tools they need to do their jobs so
a traditional requirements-driven development model may work for this
segment
...
In short, relevance is about finding a way to use business
intelligence to simplify their work and make it better
...
Relevance is business intelligence with
an “it’s all about me” mindset
...
Don’t let BI priorities
be driven only by those individuals who shout the loudest
...
(Refer to Figure 4-5,
Chapter 4 for current industry averages
...

Don’t rely exclusively on the traditional requirements-gathering process of asking people what they want; instead, study the way people
work, incentives that influence them, decisions they make, and the
information that supports those decisions to derive requirements
...
It is not something I surveyed people about
...
1

Waterfall Development Process
Traditional systems development projects follow a waterfall project
approach: a set of tasks is completed, and then another set, until several months or years later, you have a working piece of software (see
Figure 10-1)
...
The thinking goes that if you get your requirements
right upfront, then you save development costs later in the process
...

Such a project approach is reasonable for portions of a business intelligence solution and as long as the time frames are reasonable, but it is
not acceptable for business-facing solutions
...
Recall
from Chapter 1 that one of the ways in which business intelligence
is used is to uncover opportunities
...
Instead of a fixed report or
dashboard, the BI application has to facilitate exploration of a broad set
of data
...
Click here for terms of use
...
”
These fundamental aspects of business intelligence make the waterfall
approach to project management inappropriate to much of the BI initiative
...

A key secret to making BI a killer application within your company is to
provide a business intelligence environment that is flexible enough to
adapt to a changing business environment at the pace of the business
environment—fast and with frequent change
...
Items farther on the right are less
time-consuming to change and therefore more adaptable to changing
business requirements
...
For each portion of the BI architecture, you may want to adopt a
periodic release schedule, but a schedule that balances the need for stability with responsiveness
...
The frequency for change
varies due to the cost of change, the degree of difficulty to change, the
number of people and related components affected by the change, risk,
and the corresponding business value provided by the change
...

As an example, getting various stakeholders and individual lines of
business to agree on consistent business definitions is difficult and timeconsuming
...
Once everyone agrees
on a definition, however, implementing a consistent calculation of such
business metrics within a business view or scorecard is something that
can be implemented rapidly
...

Sometimes developers will hard-code business definitions into individual
reports: stakeholders can’t agree, so a report is the “easiest” and fastest
place to define an element
...
Now those hundreds of instances of “customer
churn” or “product profitability” have to be changed in hundreds of individual reports, as opposed to in one business view
...
Other components, such as the hardware
for the BI server or data warehouse, may only need to be changed when a
company wants to update the infrastructure or add capacity
...


Agile Development Techniques
The concept of agile software development emerged from an informal
gathering of software engineers in 2001
...

Upon first reading the Agile Manifesto, I had to chuckle at “Welcome
changing requirements…” In truth, changing requirements is typically
something IT people dread because it means rework, which leads to
a project deliverable that is over budget and late
...
Instead, they work
from a broad requirement, with specific capabilities that are identified
and narrowed down through a prototyping process
...
When using

Agile Development

143

A Subset of Principles from the Agile Manifesto
■

■

■

■

■

■

■

■

Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and
continuous delivery of valuable software
...

Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive
advantage
...

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information
to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation
...

Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design
enhances agility
...

The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from
self-organizing teams
...
Discarding a
prototype after a collaborative session is more expeditious than asking
the business users to list precisely their requirements, having someone
build a solution to those requirements, and then discovering that the
requirements have changed or that there was a misinterpretation
...
A specific task is iterated and recycled until
the project team is satisfied with the capabilities, within a defined time
frame and in adherence to the resource constraints (time and people)
agreed upon in the planning stage
...

For this iterative process to be successful, the business users and
the IT developers must work closely together in a collaborative fashion
...
In addition to logistical
issues such as war rooms, in order for such collaborative development
to be successful, the business and IT must have a strong partnership as
described in Chapter 8
...
Industry literature suggests
that some of the barriers to adoption are concerns about higher costs
and inability for the business and IT to partner together
...
3 Some key findings in support of agile
software development include:
■

■

■

■

44% of survey respondents (781 responses) indicated a 90% success
rate at agile projects and another 33% reported success rates between
75 and 90%
...

83% of agile teams used iteration lengths between 1 and 4 weeks
...
]
Smaller teams had higher success rates than larger teams
...
Collaborative design sessions that are
characteristic of agile development can too easily slip into never-ending
tweaks to the system
...

Having a BI program well-managed was averaged very important by
survey respondents, and 25% rated it as essential to a successful business intelligence deployment
...
Nonetheless, the stigma of project failures still
seems to linger and is perhaps exaggerated
...
4 However, as the following chart shows, a sizable portion of data
warehouse projects, 44% on average, are late
...

Percentage of BI Projects on Budget
100%
80%
57%

60%
40%

37%

20%

6%

0%
Over budget

On budget

Under budget

146

Chapter 10

The study did not account for the business intelligence front-end
portion, and there is no commentary on the severity of the lateness
and budget overrun
...

There are three key variables in managing a BI project effectively:
■

■

■

Scope For example, the subject areas and data accessible for analysis, the underlying infrastructure, the BI tool capabilities, and the
quality
Resources The amount of money and number of people you have
available to invest in the project
Time The deadline for delivering a set of capabilities

Like a three-legged stool, when any one of these variables changes,
it affects the other variables
...

or
The resources will stay fixed and the project timeline must be
renegotiated
...
When
the severity of data quality problems are not known, allowing appropriate
time to handle such issues is guesswork
...
That’s not reality
...


Agile Development

147

To manage a BI project effectively, repeat the project managers’ mantra,
frequently, and to any one who requests a change: there’s scope, time,
and resources
...
Scope, time, and resources
...
If new capabilities
are requested, communicate the corresponding increase in resources
and time
...
5 Prior to this, users had to define their requirements in advance and formally submit them to the IT group
...
Dave Walker, the vice president of operations at
1-800 CONTACTS, describes the dynamics of agile development as
one of the reasons for their success
...
The IT
people in the data warehouse team understand the call center so well,
they could probably take some calls
...
It’s not ‘make a list, send it over
...
It takes lot of time and effort on both sides, but the end product
is well worth it
...
Disagreements
about prioritizations and resource allocation are resolved by a finance
director who reports to the executive sponsor
...
If users are building or customizing their own reports and
dashboards, they most likely are not working from a documented list
of requirements or at most, from needs and thoughts jotted in an
e-mail request
...
“Before the data
warehouse and these cubes, we always had to go to the IT group who
produced something static
...
It didn’t facilitate
a rapid response to change in sales volume or other business event
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
Project managers should recognize that because of the ways in which
business intelligence is used, solutions must be flexible and modifiable in response to changing business requirements
...

■

■
■

■

Be prepared to change the business-facing parts of BI on a more rapid
basis than the behind-the-scenes infrastructure
...

Repeat the project manager’s mantra: there is scope, resources, and
time
...

Understand how quality and the desire for perfection can sabotage
a project’s timeline
...


Chapter 11

Organizing for Success

Given the myriad ways that business intelligence reaches across an
entire organization, attention to organizational issues can accelerate BI
success; failure to address organizational issues hinders success
...


Enterprise vs
...
Some of the best ideas may incubate
within individual departments or business units, and this may be the
ideal place to test the BI waters
...

“We started small to avoid enterprise data governance issues and be
able to get the foundation right
...
”
—Database administrator from a state agency who describes
their BI deployment as very successful

Some of the same challenges in establishing a strong business-IT
partnership also affect whether business intelligence is approached as an
enterprise solution or as a departmental initiative
...
The consequences of

149
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


150

Chapter 11

underperforming at a departmental or business unit level can be severe
...

Job lay-offs may follow the underperformance
...


When business intelligence is deployed departmentally or at the
business unit level and is pivotal in ensuring the success of that department or business unit, then the BI team is usually at liberty to do whatever it takes to be successful
...
And yet, for greater company success, business intelligence
must be treated as a strategic asset managed at the enterprise level
...

The business unit does not derive any added value from synergies with
other business units in the company
...

Employee compensation at the business unit level is not tied to any
total company performance objectives
...

In looking at how BI is typically delivered, according to survey
respondents, it is fairly mixed with 51% describing their BI deployment

151

Organizing for Success

as enterprisewide and 49% as departmental
...
Conversely, the percentage of those who describe
their project for departmental BI as a failure (11%) is double that for
enterprise solutions (5%)
...
Here,
too, enterprisewide deployments report a higher rate of users at 28% of
employees versus departmental at 22% of employees
...
Roughly the same percentage of small companies (less than
100 employees or less than $100 million in annual revenues) delivered
BI departmentally as did large companies (greater than 5,000 employees or greater than $1 billion in revenues)
...
I would have expected that newer
projects (less than one year) would have been more departmental in
nature and older deployments (greater than three years) would grow
to an enterprise focus
...

Departmental vs
...


Departmental BI may show success faster because the BI team is
dealing with less diverse requirements, requiring less buy-in, and with
less consideration to an enterprise-class infrastructure
...
With only one programmer, there was not even a project plan!
Meanwhile, the Global Reporting Project was trying to understand,
prioritize, and meld requirements from 15 different business units, with
developers spread around the world
...
Use
the agile development techniques described in Chapter 10 to deliver
enterprise capabilities in time frames that mirror those of departmental
solutions, ideally every 90 days
...

Often, this success can’t be replicated
...
Whatever was initially built
at the departmental level has to be scrapped and an enterprise solution
built from scratch
...
”
—Henry Ford3

This is not to say that enterprise solutions should neglect the unique
requirements of a business unit or department
...
If ever a department or business unit perceives
critical requirements are being neglected by a central BI team, they
will be forced to develop their own solutions
...
Some components of the BI
front-end (see Chapter 3), in particular the business views, dashboards,

Organizing for Success

153

BI & Tragedy of the Commons
The tragedy of the commons “involves a conflict over resources
between individual interests and the common good
...

Herders, for example, who have to share pasture for sheep, will continue to add sheep to the property when the products from the sheep
(wool production) exceed the cost in degrading the common pasture
...

The tragedy of the commons was first introduced to me in business school
...
I believed that if the negative
impact on the common good were better understood, we’d behave
differently
...
One professor would offer an individual an A
or the group one less assignment if the group acted in unison
...
Another professor resorted to cold, hard
cash as the common resource
...
A few made out like bandits, while the more
naïve of us were left mouths agape at how greedily some behaved
...
According to industry research, 42% of companies
buy business intelligence tools at a departmental level
...
It would make sense to build an enterprise solution once, rather than build multiple islands of solutions
that end up costing the company more
...
Individual departments are forced to fight for their own
solutions, rather than working together to share resources, data,
and expertise
...
There are rogue initiatives started by people with a need
that can not convince the official corporate program to undertake since
the corporate program has bigger projects in mind
...
Some of the data I need for my business is owned
by another department, and I can not get my hands on it because they
are too busy with other projects to work on my request
...
”
—Business user in customer service in the computer industry

and reports, will be specific to each individual department
...
Sometimes, that business value might be in time-to-market
...
In comparing this table to the BI life cycle (see Figure 2-3 in
Chapter 2), the farther left on the BI life cycle, the greater the likelihood it can be treated as an enterprise resource; the farther right on the
diagram, the more likely it will be optimized by or for a business unit or
department
...
Within a bank, there may be a credit card business unit, a mortgage unit, and a consumer checking account unit
...
Here, then, the credit
card business unit may decide to buy its own fraud detection solution
...

One of the items in the right-hand column in Table 11-1 that seems
to generate the most debate is the responsibility for the business views (see
the section on a business view of the data in Chapter 3)
...
In some cases, though,
responsibility for building the business views gravitates to the individual
departments
...
The ability to do this and whether it’s in the best
interest of the company and the business unit will depend greatly on:
■

■
■
■

Availability of technical resources within the business unit or
department
Responsiveness of the central BI group
Business or domain expertise of the central BI group
Degree to which a business unit–specific business view must be
reused by other departments and business units

All of these best practices, however, are only possible when other
aspects of the company and the business intelligence initiative are working well
...
When
personal agendas, politics, or analysis-paralysis prevail, then an enterprisewide approach to business intelligence also becomes less viable
...
The BI program manager

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is also an active member of the steering committee
...

Steering committee members will meet on a regular basis, as often as
weekly, to resolve conflicting priorities, identify new opportunities, and
resolve issues escalated from the project team
...

For example, at Continental Airlines, the Data Warehouse Steering
Committee is comprised of 30 people, most of whom are at the director
level and higher
...

While the steering committee at Continental Airlines is quite large
and commensurate with the size of the corporation, sometimes working
with such large committees can make progress more difficult
...
In many respects, it
was necessary to include all functions and business units to ensure buyin to the BI initiative
...
Trying to schedule face-to-face meetings with larger groups became a
logistical nightmare
...
In this regard, the ideal size of the committee balances the trade-offs of being able to perform with the needs of
ensuring buy-in and alignment with the business
...
With the infrastructure established, the BI team meets with the director of treasury, financial
planning and analysis on a weekly basis to coordinate and prioritize activities
...
5

Business Intelligence Competency
Centers (BICC)
Gartner Research defines a BICC as a “cross-functional team with
specific tasks, roles, responsibilities, and processes for supporting and
promoting the effective use of BI across the organization
...
” While the terminology
for BICCs is relatively new, the concept is not, and some of the successful BI case studies have had BICCs (but refer to them with different
terminology) for more than a decade
...
If you are trying to
transform your BI focus from a departmental resource to an enterprise
solution, a BICC is an effective organizational model that will facilitate this
...
A BI project may be partially
or fully staffed by BICC personnel
...
The BICC can either be a virtual
team or a dedicated team with permanent resources and a formal budget
...

Some of the roles within the BICC may be dedicated resources or
they may be shared with other groups
...
Alternatively, a DBA (database administrator)
from a central IT department may allocate a percentage of his or her
time to the BICC
...
For example, Continental Airlines has four
business-oriented people as part of its 15-person data warehouse team

Figure 11-2 BI organizational model

158

Chapter 11

(Continental does not call their team a BICC but it acts as a BICC)
...
As
more data sources and capabilities were added, these people transitioned into a permanent role on the data warehouse team, expanded
their expertise, and applied the same skills to other subject areas
...


BICC Guiding Principles
Develop a vision for BI and establish guiding principles that all
the stakeholders, steering committee members, project teams, and
BICC can refer to
...

The business will establish the priorities, and IT will deliver
according to those priorities
...

We will strive to focus on the business value of business intelligence and not get sidetracked by technology for technology’s sake
...

Data errors will be corrected at the source
...
These
successes will be communicated and actively promoted
...
Customize
those items in which there is a major difference in requirements
and fulfilling those requirements adds value to the business
...

Technology adoption will fall into the leading edge, not bleeding
edge category
...
For example, a
large aerospace manufacturer began moving to a BICC model in 2004
...
The remaining staff get billed to specific BI projects
...
Our
goal is to help our IT counterparts within the businesses to succeed
...

The BICC may develop common training materials and select a vendor
to deliver the training
...
In larger organizations, training may be coordinated via the human resources department
...
9 Like many companies, IT was initially responsible
for authoring reports and designing decision support systems (DSSs)
...
Each developed his or her own reports, using whichever tool they
were most familiar with
...

When business leaders met, the first point of discussion was the
numbers, not the business
...
Part of the solution involved
selecting a new BI tool
...
As part of this reorganization, the regional DSS expert positions
were eliminated and a central business analysis group established
...
If you mentioned BI or reporting, you got a dirty
look
...
S
...

There were some job protection issues
...
”
The 31 regional DSS roles were eliminated and replaced by 4 centralized experts
...
While companies may have a team of reporting experts within the
finance group, they normally focus on financial reporting only, and not

160

Chapter 11

merchandising, inventory, and so on
...
IT meanwhile kept responsibility for the data warehouse, but the business analysis team led the
charge to select a new BI tool (MicroStrategy—see Chapter 12), build
the business views, and build the reports
...
While the CFO is the formal sponsor and the person to
whom Schwartz reports, the CEO and VPs of the major business units
supported the organizational changes
...
Scott says, “Matt fought through organizational issues and stayed focused on the vision
...
It has helped pull together cross-functional teams in
ways we couldn’t before
...
It’s also important to ensure that that
team is comprised of the best people
...
“Like most functions, success comes from the
people you hire, putting the right team in place with strong development
capabilities
...
You have to invest in
hiring and retaining top talent
...
With the best people, a clear vision, and
empowerment, you can accomplish anything, not just successful business intelligence! It’s not that anyone sets out to hire mediocre people,
right? In reality, though, attracting and keeping the best people is no
small task
...
Keeping the business analysis team excited and fired up is
a priority at Corporate Express
...
“There has to be a pride
of ownership
...
He also credits the success of the BI team
to its diversity
...

“There is a power in getting a mix of people together
...
”
Having a successful BI initiative and a culture that fosters information sharing and fact-based decisions can further help companies
attract the best people
...

Bachenheimer describes his initial reaction to EMA’s BI application:
“When interviewing here three years ago, I saw a report and drooled!
My hospital was struggling with this stuff
...
”
Professor Rosabeth Kanter of the Harvard Business School,
describes three mechanisms companies can use to ensure greater commitment in a tight labor market: meaning, membership, and mastery
...
This is one reason why it’s important for technical
experts to understand the business value of what they are building and
that success stories are actively promoted (see Chapter 13)
...
One way companies
can foster a greater sense of membership is to celebrate major BI milestones, whether it’s by giving out silver dollars or throwing a party
...
This last dimension of ensuring commitment can be a challenge with BI when an overemphasis
on the latest technology can distract from the business focus of the BI
project
...

Attracting the best people and keeping the BI team motivated is only
possible when the importance of BI is recognized by senior management
...


BI Team Leaders as Level 5 Leaders
Some of the organizational concepts covered in this chapter become
increasingly important with larger companies and more complex deployments
...

(Note: The precise title for this person will vary company to company
...
”) In small to
mid-size businesses, the BI director is even more important because this
may be the whole team or the director may have only a couple of fulltime resources
...

As I interviewed sponsors, users, and BI directors from multiple
companies, people often attributed their BI success to the BI director,
particularly in the smaller firms
...
Instead, there is a degree of humility about the role they
have played in their company’s BI success
...

Collins describes a level 5 leader as “an individual who blends
extreme personal humility with intense professional will…Level
5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the
larger goal of building a great company
...
Indeed they are incredibly ambitious—but
their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not for themselves
...

At one point, I was concerned my admiration for Collins’s work was
skewing my perception, that this phenomenon was perhaps not as big a
driver of success as I was making it
...
12 “Before Jim joined the company,
everything was just queries
...
Jim established
a discipline and vision
...
Walker was insistent
that not all leaders are like Jim Hill
...
He just wants to dig in and
has an amazing service attitude
...
He interjects energy into all these projects and is so engaging

Organizing for Success

163

in meetings
...
” Walker then
concluded, “He really is one of those leaders in that book…that book…”
I waited, not wanting to put words in his mouth
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
Organizational issues can hinder or accelerate successful business intelligence
...
Even in the early
stages, keep a view on the future and consider how the departmental
initiative will evolve into an enterprise effort
...

Establish a BI Steering Committee comprised of senior executives from all major business units and functions who use business
intelligence
...
Establish a Business Intelligence Competency
Center, whether virtual or physical
...

Hire, motivate, and retain the best people
...


This page intentionally left blank

Chapter 12

The Right BI Tool
for the Right User

It was 1994
...
One of the main justifications for the Global Reporting Project
was to reduce the cost of multiple, regional homegrown systems
...
” And yet, everything about BI tools in the early 1990s was
bleeding edge
...
Technical
experts and end users were jointly involved in the process, a best practice by today’s standards but a somewhat novel approach then
...
Having gotten burned by
the IBM OS/2 demise beneath Microsoft Windows, we did not want to
underestimate Microsoft’s force in the BI market
...
)
We attended software industry conferences, such as CeBIT in
Germany and Business Intelligence Forum in England (TDWI—The
Data Warehousing Institute—also did not yet exist), searching for
solutions
...
0 releases
...
That was another guiding principle—no “not invented here”
syndrome allowed
...
Dow Elanco had BusinessObjects
installed for a couple hundred users
...

165
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


166

Chapter 12

We gave preference to solutions from vendors with whom we had
relationships, which included Oracle, our database standard, and SAP,
our ERP standard
...
We had intended BusinessObjects to be for power users
and Cognos PowerPlay for managers who were accustomed to guided
screens and drill-downs of the decision support systems
...
The commercial users declared Cognos PowerPlay
was too hard for them
...
The finance users wanted to know what our transition plans were for their thousands of FOCEXECs (files created with
Information Builders Focus, a fourth-generation programming language
or 4GL that was then the primary method for creating ad hoc reports)
...
Further inciting dissatisfaction, the Global Reporting Project
manager said we only had time and resources to deploy one of the two
tools recommended
...

It seemed the only adequate buy-in we got was from the database
and ERP standard leaders
...
No matter how sound your recommendations or that they may
be in the best interests of the company, if you fail to build consensus
with a wider constituency along the way, your recommendations will
be rejected out of fear, uncertainty, job protection, and other random
reasons
...


As the marketing users were not satisfied with the Global Reporting
Project’s decision to support only one tool, they did what 42%1 of
departments continue to do today: they went out and bought their
own BI solution and proceeded to deploy Cognos PowerPlay on their
own
...
This
departmental initiative was highly successful until the lead programmer
left Dow
...
The prediction that
Microsoft would have a dominating solution had not yet come true, but
one prediction had: Oracle had just acquired OLAP vendor and product
IRI Express
...
We never got beyond
the prototype
...
What was initially a backroom deployment of Cognos PowerPlay became an officially supported solution from
the Global Reporting Project, in addition to BusinessObjects
...
There are now
over 12,000 users who access 90 BusinessObjects universes and 2500
Cognos PowerPlay cubes
...
Dow’s BI tool strategy continues to be based on aligning the tool
capabilities with the corresponding user requirements and use cases
...
Although Dow’s BI tool decisions
took place more than a decade ago, the challenges they faced then still
hold true for many organizations
...
Where Dow has excelled is in ensuring the business value these tools provide remains the first priority
...
Customers today continue to tell me they can confidently embark
on data integration selections within the confines of IT, but undergoing a BI tool selection jointly with business users invokes never-ending
contention
...
) Providing users with a BI tool
that facilitates access, decision-making, and action is essential to successful business intelligence
...
Contrary to widely held opinion, business
users do not care only about BI front-end tools
...

Business users do, however, give a slightly higher rating to the importance of BI tools than either system reliability or available subject areas
...
Based on case study insights, it seems to be the latter
...
The business users must embrace
the tool, and IT must be able to support it
...


“We let the user group select the tool, and the process was only facilitated by IT
...
TOTAL BUY-IN resulted
...


The Role of BI Standardization
With the plethora of BI tools now on the market and the degree to
which individual departments and business units buy BI solutions,
multiple front-end tools have only added to data chaos and multiple versions of the truth
...
Revenue in one instance may be calculated
on gross invoice amount; in another it could include adjustments for
returns and discounts; and in another it may include bad debts
...
3 A single version of the truth requires consistent representation in BI tools, in addition to a common data architecture
...
A business analyst who is a power user does not have the
same functionality requirements as a frontline worker who may only
need a visual gadget of a smaller amount of information
...
Increasingly, vendors do offer a spectrum
of tools in a complete suite or toolset
...
It offers users the benefit of seamlessly
navigating from a dashboard, through to a report, to a business query
...

When you think of BI standardization, also recognize that companies and vendors may advocate standardizing beyond just the front-end
components to include the back-end components such as the ETL tool,
data quality tool, and data warehouse platform (as shown in Figure 12-1
and discussed in Chapters 2 and 3)
...

At this time, I more often see a multivendor approach across the
entire BI life cycle but increasing standardization within the BI frontend tools
...
If you have
multiple tools in any single component, such as multiple business query
tools, rationalizing some of this duplication should be your first standardization priority
...
2 components from different BI vendors
...
If you consider all the components
described in Chapter 3, then you have potentially eight tools right there
...
A minority of survey respondents deploy
BI Tool Approach

Percentage Survey Respondents

Mostly custom BI front-ends

17%

Multiple vendors

41%

Primarily from a single vendor

42%

Table 12-1 Most Companies Use Purchased BI Products with an Equal Split in
Buying Approach

The Right BI Tool for the Right User

171

custom front-ends as their primary tool approach
...
The percentage of companies with newer deployments (less than three years) who have multiple modules mostly
from a single vendor is only 5% higher than newer deployments that
use multiple components from multiple vendors
...

While I would have expected the recent push for BI standardization
from new deployments to be higher, the total percentage of 42% is still
relatively high
...
In the Successful BI survey,
of the 41% who currently use multiple BI tools from multiple vendors,
57% are actively trying to reduce the number of modules from different
BI vendors
...
As shown in Figure 12-2,
50% of the respondents who describe their deployment as very successful
have BI tools from a single vendor, a higher percentage than the average
...
The failed deployments also
have a higher rate of primarily custom applications
...
The operative word here is primarily
...


Table 12-2 shows the BI front-end tools and vendors deployed at the
successful BI case study companies
...

This is a significant difference versus the industry
...


The Right BI Tool for the Right User

173

success to that change
...


The Right Tool for the Right User
A common misconception about BI standardization is the assumption
that all users must use the same tool
...
Instead, successful BI companies use the right tool for the
right user
...

For a power user, it might be a business query tool
...

Use the marketing concept of customer segmentation to identify
and understand the various user groups within your company
...

However, to match the BI tool with the appropriate user group, you
need to refine these two user segments
...

Segmentation is a way of looking at one large user base—for example, all employees in a company—and dividing it into smaller groups
...
Segmentation provides a way of better understanding
your users and why their requirements are different
...


174

Chapter 12

some characteristics that will help you segment potential business intelligence users
...


Suppliers

Customers

Field Staff

Inside Staff

Managers

Executives

Business Unit, Department, or Function

Percentage or number of users per segment
Frequency & nature of decision-making
Predictability of information requirements
Analytic job content
Need for detailed data (vs
...


Frequency and Nature of Fact-Based Decisions
The types of decisions supported by business intelligence can be
classified into:
■

Strategic decisions of longer-term consequences with broader implications
...
Some strategic decisions include whether to acquire a
particular company, launch a new product, change suppliers, or enter
a new market
...
They may include planning for a plant outage, increasing
capacity, changing distribution routes, and optimizing pricing policies
...

Operational decisions are more detailed in nature, and in isolation,
affect a smaller number of people than strategic decisions
...
Brenda Jansen, director of information
systems at Energizer Holdings, refers to this group of users as the “difference makers” because of the big impact these thousands of individual
decisions have in aggregate
...


In Smart Enough Systems, authors Neil Raden and James Taylor use
the chart in Figure 12-4 to describe the relationship between the
value of the decisions made and the frequency of those decisions
...
Reprinted with permission)

176

Chapter 12

in aggregate
...
As 1-800 CONTACTS
explained in Chapter 9, they saw an immediate lift in sales when they
enabled the call center dashboard
...
They do!

Predictability of Information Requirements
The degree to which information requirements are predictable is
somewhat related to the type of decision (strategic, tactical, operational) but also to the application
...
The BI application (whether an individual report, dashboard,
or widget) should provide an overview as to the health, efficiency, or
progress of the business
...
Information needs for operational BI users also
may be relatively predictable
...


Job Level
A user’s job level will affect the breadth of data the user wants to access
and the level of detail
...
Access to information may be critical but
analyzing the data is a minor aspect of these jobs, making this segment of users ideal candidates for dashboards with key performance
indicators
...
The combination of broad data requirements and more
detailed data may make it hard to deliver only dashboards
...
At the other end of
the spectrum, office staff such as accounts payable clerks or customer
service representatives may want to see only very detailed data
...


The Right BI Tool for the Right User

177

Job Function
You also can segment users according to job function
...
Functional requirements also may vary by function:
consider how many spreadsheet power users there are in any finance
department
...
Marketing personnel will have different information requirements, and with respect
to functionality, they may ask for things such as predictive analysis
or Microsoft PowerPoint integration that other groups have not
requested
...
The analytic
component also may relate to either the job level or the job function,
or sometimes to both
...
These
are the number crunchers who will work intensely with business intelligence tools
...
It’s easy to assume that these people are
your only users, since they may have solutions implemented first,
complain loudest when something is wrong, live and die by access
to information, and control the information flow to secondary users
...
Remember, though, that not everyone
can spend all day collecting, manipulating, and exploring data
...
They may only log into a BI tool for ten
minutes a day (or week) just to make sure the business is running
smoothly
...

Instead, they may call the business or financial analyst to figure out
why there is a problem
...
It’s a profound difference to empower a user—to provide them
with easy tools to access and explore information when they need to—
and an altogether different scenario to assume accessing and analyzing
data is their primary job
...
Do not let their demands fool you
into thinking all your users need these advanced capabilities
...


Level of Data Literacy
Data literacy and computer literacy are two entirely different things
...
Source system
users and users whose jobs have a high analytic content may understand
the data well and have a high level of data literacy
...
Other users may not understand these nuances
...
If you give users with low data literacy access to a business
query tool and they create incorrect queries because they didn’t understand the different ways revenue could be calculated, the BI tool will be
perceived as delivering bad data
...
Regardless of whether your company uses a BI tool directly
against the transaction system or an ERP-populated data warehouse,
these users will be more familiar with the precise meanings of individual
data elements
...

These users may need additional explanation as to why there is a data
warehouse, a BI platform, and how the data has been transformed
...
Users who primarily surf the Web but who are
not proficient with spreadsheets and other Windows-based programs fall
somewhere in the middle
...
Information sharing is much more prevalent, yet boundaries

The Right BI Tool for the Right User

179

still exist, and less tech-savvy employees may greet BI with a degree of
trepidation
...
These users may request scheduled, printed reports or, in the
absence of such automation, may rely on gut-feel decision-making
...
Technical and information literacy is evolutionary
...


Level of Spreadsheet Usage
Spreadsheet users deserve their own segment and, thus, sometimes their
own BI interface
...
There are a number of reasons
why users want all their data delivered via spreadsheets; some reasons are
valid, and others less so (for more discussion on this, see BIScorecard
...
If spreadsheet usage is high for a
particular user segment, then you may deploy spreadsheet-based BI interfaces to this segment
...
Instead, users work within a spreadsheet and
refresh the data live from the BI platform into the spreadsheet, preserving
data integrity
...


Amount of Travel
Certain job types require more travel than others
...
Support for mobile capabilities within the BI tool
will be important for this user segment
...
External Users
Consider the different needs of employees of the company and suppliers and customers that you may provide information to via an extranet
...
External users have
different requirements from your internal users
...


The Most Successful BI Module
Figure 12-5 shows which front-end modules of a BI deployment
survey respondents considered most successful
...

Given the recent excitement around dashboards and predictive
analytics and some negative industry comments about ad hoc query
tools only being good for power users, I investigated if the results were
skewed by a larger portion of power users responding to the survey
(67%)
...
Fixed report users ranked standard reports as the most
successful part of the BI deployment, followed by ad hoc query tools by
a slight margin
...


70%

The Right BI Tool for the Right User

181

the business users an ability to respond more quickly to questions and
the changing business environment
...
This kind of self-service reporting environment continues to be a
key ingredient to BI success not only for the power users, but also for
those who benefit from the results of this flexibility
...


A Word about Microsoft Office Integration
Microsoft Excel is sometimes referred to as the leading BI tool, and yet,
it ranked in the middle of tool modules, with only 31% of respondents
selecting Microsoft Office integration and Excel as the most successful
part of the BI deployment
...
The problem is not with spreadsheets per se, but rather, with
how they are used and not managed
...
6
RedEnvelope, a catalog gift company, shares fell 25% when Cost of
Goods Sold was incorrectly reported due to a spreadsheet error
...


Despite these problems, BI users consistently say that a large percentage of ad hoc and standard BI reports are routinely exported to
Excel
...
This percentage
has remained fairly consistent in conferences polled in Orlando, Florida
(November 2006), and Rome, Italy (June 2007)
...
The ability
to integrate with Excel in this managed way has been an area of continuous improvement for many BI vendors
...
Corporate Express,
for example, has given its field sellers access to MicroStrategy Office,
which allows reports to be delivered and refreshed directly from within
PowerPoint
...


Best Practices for Successful
Business Intelligence
For business users, the BI tool is the face of the entire business intelligence architecture
...
Deploy a good BI tool
on top of messy data or an unreliable system, and the tool will be blamed
for underlying difficulties
...
Supplement the BI platform with niche
products and custom applications on a limited basis, only where the
BI platform is lacking in capabilities
...

Do not constantly change products and vendors only for technology’s
sake, as BI vendors innovate at different rates, and vendors may leapfrog each other in capabilities for any individual module
...

Segment your users to understand their unique requirements, and
deploy the correct BI module for that group of users
...
Aspects in this chapter are not as significant but they are common
themes that warrant attention: company culture, promoting the BI
application, training, and the use of graphical display
...
A company can have a perfect business intelligence architecture, and yet, if they don’t have a culture that supports business intelligence, that perfect architecture is a waste
...

Culture is one of those intangible forces that nonetheless profoundly
affects how people view and value business intelligence
...

Decisions are made from gut feel and not fact-based analysis
...

We are a lean company that operates efficiently
...


I grouped these statements into characteristics that are considered
enablers of BI and barriers to BI
...

183
Copyright © 2008 by The McGraw-Hill Companies
...


184

Chapter 13

One of the biggest cultural differentiators between successful BI companies and those who describe their deployments as failures was the degree
to which decisions are made based on facts versus gut feel (see Figure
13-1)
...
Contrast
this with survey respondents who describe their BI deployments as failures,
in which a staggering 80% can be described as having gut-feel decision
making and only 20% as having fact based
...

Management expert Jim Collins in his book Good to Great identifies
one of the key characteristics of companies with sustained competitive
advantage as the ability to “confront the brutal facts…You absolutely
cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the
brutal facts
...
”1 Even
at Corporate Express, CFO Robert VanHees says that one of the challenges to consistent BI adoption has been in getting people to think
about fact-based decision making
...
Sometimes experience and numerous facts may
Fact-Based vs
...


Other Secrets to Success

185

get synthesized into what is our “gut” feel
...
As
Jonathan Rothman, director of data management at Emergency Medical
Associates, says, “Doctors often have to rely more on experience than
fact-based decision making
...
In the emergency room, you may not have
time to run a lot of tests, and you have to make fast decisions
...
”3
The problem is when biases and inaccurate data also get filtered
into the gut
...

Take the case of a small plastics packaging business
...
Or so they thought
...
With a new
purchasing manager in place at the customer, it seemed a longstanding
relationship was not an influencing factor in the decision to change suppliers
...
While this customer accounted for a
significant portion of the supplier’s revenue, when the supplier analyzed
the profit margin for this customer, they found little to none
...
The supplier only realized this when they
began studying the data to understand the impact of this customer loss
...

Even when company culture encourages fact-based decision making, recognize that facts can still be misinterpreted, misrepresented,
or buried
...
”4 The
confirming evidence trap causes decision makers to seek information
that supports a decision they have already made (by gut or intuition
or personal agenda) and to ignore facts that may contradict that decision
...

During the analysis, there were lively debates about how much fixed
and overhead cost should really be allocated to the customer; any
underallocation would make retaining the customer seemingly more
attractive
...
Removing biases
and other errors in decision making are dynamics of company culture
that affect how well business intelligence is used
...
In his article “The Formula,” Malcolm
Gladwell recounts all the warning signs of a pending catastrophic failure at Enron
...
Banks with sizable investments in the
company would not want to see their money so at risk
...
A bigger problem, though, is that the facts
were so convoluted and poorly presented that the poor financial health
of the company was not readily discernible
...


For example, Continental Airlines offers a concierge service to its
BusinessFirst international passengers
...
6 By redesigning the reports, the BI team could give the concierges more information, but in one report, allowing the concierges to
more readily see the most important information
...
“At
every stage of the decision-making process, misperceptions, biases, and
other tricks of the mind can influence the choices we make…the best
protection against all psychological traps…is awareness
...
The number of MBA
programs that offer business intelligence and statistical analysis courses
increases each year
...


187

Other Secrets to Success

Keep in mind that the chicken-and-egg syndrome will play out here too
...
You have to first deliver BI capabilities in order for people to make
routine decisions based on facts
...

Leanness & Efficiency
Moderately
Successful

Failure

Use of Technology for Competitive Advantage
Very Successful
79%

80%

Moderately
Successful

Failure

Very Successful

100%

93%
85%

80%
% of Respondents

% of Respondents

63%
60%
53%
47%
40%

37%

60%

56%
44%

40%

21%
20%

20%

15%
7%

0%

0%

Tech Wary
Fat &
Inefficient

Lean

Fat &
Inefficient

Lean

Fat &
Inefficient

Lean

Tech
Tech Wary
Tech
Tech Wary
Tech
Embracers
Embracers
Embracers

Access to Data
Moderately
Successful

Failure

Innovation
Very Successful

Failure

Moderately
Successful

Very Successful

100%

80%

75%

70%

92%
86%

67%

64%

80%

% of Respondents

% of Respondents

60%
50%
40%

36%

33%

30%

25%

61%

60%

40%

39%

20%
20%
10%

14%
8%

0%

0%
Hoarders

Figure 13-2
companies
...
The survey showed that 79% of successful BI companies see
themselves as lean, whereas only 63% of moderately successful BI
companies see themselves as lean, and 47% of the failures describe
themselves as lean
...
Among the failures and very successful BI companies alike,
there was not a major difference in whether respondents felt access
to data at their company was overly controlled or that executives fear
workers know too much (see Figure 13-2, Access to Data chart)
...
Anecdotally, though, information hoarding is
often cited as a barrier to BI success
...
In hindsight, I also think this survey question
could have been framed without attributing the source of the problem
to executive control
...
At Corporate Express, Walter Scott, vice president
of marketing, explains, “Some departments don’t like the data being
exposed
...
’ If other people can see
pricing discrepancies, for example, then the pricing department fears
that others may see they are not doing a good job, which can make the
BI team unpopular
...
There were no major differences in these averages based on the size of the company
...
” And yet, the Field of Dreams notion does not apply to
business intelligence: you can build it, and users won’t come
...

Users will go through an evolution as you promote your business
intelligence solution (see Figure 13-3)
...
You want everyone—not just power
users or initial users—to have heard of business intelligence
...
The third phase
of promotion is to increase usage, in which people within all levels of

We couldn’t
run our
business
without it!
How do I
get access?

I think I can
get product
profitability
from BI
I heard we’re
building a data
warehouse

Awareness

Knowledge

Figure 13-3 The phases of promoting business intelligence

Usage

190

Chapter 13

the organization are aware of business intelligence, know when to use it,
and use it as an invaluable tool to achieve business goals
...
Different user
segments (see Chapter 12) will be at different stages simultaneously
...
If you wait until then,
however, you are starting too late and it will take you longer to achieve any
measurable benefits
...
Clearly, you need to manage user
expectations and not promise more functionality than you can deliver
...
Battered IT departments who have been
criticized for being late in the past may truly cringe at this approach,
preferring to keep a low profile until everything is done
...


Focus on Benefits
As you do so, focus as much as possible on the benefits your implementation will deliver, not the technical features of the deployment
...
Particularly with business
intelligence, a number of technical features will have little meaning to
users
...
Table 13-1 highlights
some features that are better described to users in terms of the benefits
they provide
...


Disconnected access

Ability to work with reports while traveling or at
a customer site
...


Exception-based reporting

Proactively manage the business when indicators fall below a certain threshold; fix a problem
before it is out of control
...
For example, “24/7” (as in
24 hours a day, 7 days a week) is a feature of when the BI application
may be available
...

A fun team-building exercise is to have the BI project team practice
their elevator speech for real business users
...
It is a big
departure from the technobabble that may be more familiar
...

It’s all in 3rd normal form and we’ve
custom-coded the ETL process
...
”

Key Messages When you promote your BI solution, develop key messages or taglines that emphasize these benefits
...
For example, if users currently have to
wait months to receive a custom report, a key message may be “information now
...
” In developing your
BI taglines, look for inspiration from some of the most successful promotional campaigns, as shown in Table 13-2
...


“America runs on Dunkin’”TM

MasterCard

Using MasterCard makes
you happy
...
”

Milk, sponsored by
the California Milk
Processor Board

Drinking milk gives you
strong bones and makes
you healthier
...
” As summer 2007 became
one of the worst on record for on-time performance and flight cancellations, they creatively promoted a new tagline: “When the travel gets
tough, the tough fly smarter
...
A New Jersey school
district uses the tagline “data drives instruction
...
The benefit of including the vendorprovided name is that you can leverage some of the vendor’s marketing
efforts
...
If you are suffering from a stalled implementation or if there were negative impressions
early in the implementation, change the name! Corporate Express, for
example, actively moved away from a vendor-specific name to Apollo
...
To encourage creativity
and participation, the person submitting the winning name won an iPod
...
8 When you develop your own BI product name, be
sure to consider the acronym created
...
Table 13-3 lists the BI
product names used at Successful BI Case Studies
...
WISDOM Gold is an enhanced extranet version
...

Honeycomb Used by Burt’s Bees to brand information accessed
via BusinessObjects XI
...

YODA Your On-line Data Access
...
Remember, the goal with promotion is to move

Other Secrets to Success

193

Successful BI Company

BI Product Name

1-800 CONTACTS

Call Center Incentives (CCI) &
Executive Dashboard

Continental Airlines

Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW),
plus BI tool vendor names, plus specific
application names

Corporate Express

Apollo

The Dow Chemical Company

Shared Data Network (SDN), plus
BI tool vendor names, plus specific
applications such as TPM (Transactional
Pocket Margin)

Emergency Medical Associates

WEBeMARS™ (Emergency Medicine
Analysis & Reporting Services)

Conducive Technology (FlightStats) FlightStats
Table 13-3 BI Product Names at Successful BI Case Study Companies

people from awareness of business intelligence to usage
...

■

■

Road shows When companies first start developing a business
intelligence solution, many have corresponding information sessions
about what is coming, when phase 1 will be available, and who will
be trained first
...

Video clips and podcasts Some companies have created web videos
and podcasts to explain their BI program and the benefits it delivers
...
Podcasts are a newer
medium that allow people to listen to short sound-bites and interviews
over the Internet or via an iPod
...
While a video or podcast
may be difficult to produce at first, it helps reduce travel costs and
logistic issues in always getting the right people together
...
You can access a number of customer testimonials and experiences with business intelligence from their website (www
...
com/podcast/archive)
...
Given the
readership of company newsletters, the primary purpose of these
articles should be to build awareness, not necessarily usage
...
It is not an ideal medium for explaining detailed
functionality
...
In
fact, successful BI companies have said that the external media attention has helped motivate, attract, and retain top talent
...
There
are a number of ways to get your project into an industry journal
...
You can volunteer to be interviewed by one of
your BI vendors for a press release
...
Finally, consider submitting an application for industry awards
...

Brown-bag lunches A brown-bag lunch is a casual informationsharing session in which participants bring a bagged lunch (coffee
or breakfast works too) and discuss effective usage of business intelligence
...
A facilitator
may start the lunch with a success story, tip, or project update
...

Internal user conferences Just as BI vendors host periodic user
conferences, do the same in your own company
...
Then ask users to share tips and techniques on both the how-to
of BI tools and how it has helped them achieve business goals
...
As both a motivational technique and a promotion
opportunity, get the entire team to wear their giveaway on milestone
dates
...

Seeing 50 yellow T-shirts in the company cafeteria will generate

Other Secrets to Success

■

■

195

interest and curiosity about what’s new
...
Using the theme of the captain in Moby
Dick, the project manager gave each team member a silver dollar for
every 100 users trained
...
(I still have my silver dollars
...

Portal The company portal or BI portal is useful for promoting
to existing users and keeping them informed; however, it is a poor
medium for new or potential users who may not see these messages
...

Routine staff meetings Most departments and business units have
regularly scheduled staff meetings
...
A real sign of success is when the department invites you and
requests 30 minutes!

Training
A common theme with the successful BI case studies was the attention
to training and that the training focused on the data and not only on the
BI tools
...

“Training and adoption has been longer and harder than expected
...
Training should also be tailored to meet the needs of the
various user segments (see Chapter 12)
...


196

Chapter 13

At Emergency Medical Associates, this is where ease of use and
web-based BI are also important
...
It’s self-serve and only takes a few clicks
to call up a report
...
It
uses a skill set they already have
...
9
Following are some additional things to consider in developing a
training approach:
■

Data vs
...
If you train users only on the BI tool
with only sample databases, users may not be able to apply these skills
against their own data
...
As you extend the reach
of BI, a greater emphasis must be given to the specific data, business
insights, and desired actions
...


■

■

Internal vs
...
Some will customize the training
material to include your specific business views, reports, dashboards,
and data in the screen shots
...

Training method While classroom-style training is the most traditional, it can pose a logistical challenge when users are at different
sites, have busy schedules, and access different data sources
...


Regardless of the formal training method, for a successful implementation you must supplement scheduled training classes with other means
to share tips, techniques, and uses
...
One of the successful BI case studies expressed concern
...
” In this regard,
recognize that training is an ongoing service and requirement that needs
to be separated from the development team
...


A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Numbers
Many of the successful BI case studies make much better use of visualizations than other companies I have worked with
...
When I
asked to see sample screen shots of how the case study companies were
using business intelligence, rarely did I get a dense page of numbers
...

Visualization expert Edward Tufte suggests that a tabular display of
numbers is better when 20 numbers or fewer are involved
...

In truth, sometimes you do need a precise number—you want the
part number, the customer phone number, the charge on your credit
card bill
...
All too often, it
seems report developers first try to re-create a report as it existed in
a legacy system (that may lack graphing capabilities)
...
Instead, BI experts
should better leverage the visualization capabilities within BI tools to
more effectively communicate the data
...
This suggests that the
problem lies in both inadequate training and lack of awareness on how
best to communicate data
...
And yet, you
may still encounter only moderate success unless you take into account
the subtle—yet profound—effect of company culture
...
Work with senior executives
to foster a fact-based decision-making environment and one that
encourages appropriate access to data
...

Deliver training that is tailored to user segments on an ongoing
basis
...
Train
users on both the tool and the data they are accessing with their
preferred tool
...


Chapter 14

The Future of
Business Intelligence

The future of business intelligence centers on making BI relevant for
everyone, not only for information workers and internal employees, but
also beyond corporate boundaries, to extend the reach of BI to customers and suppliers
...
It
will take cultural shifts, new ways of thinking, and continued technical innovation
...
All of this
is possible based on insights available at the click of a mouse, push of a
button, or touch of a screen
...

Don’t rely on technical innovation alone to solve the biggest barriers to
BI success, but by all means, do get excited about the innovations that
will make BI easier and more prevalent
...
This chapter focuses
on the most recent technical innovations with examples of how customers are taking advantage of them
...


Emerging Technologies
As part of the Successful BI Survey, respondents were asked to choose
items from a list of emerging technologies that they believe will help
their companies achieve greater success
...
Click here for terms of use
...
(Results based
on 513 responses
...
Web-based business intelligence and dashboards were rated the
highest, with predictive analytics and alerting also at the top
...

The view according to business users, however, is slightly different, as shown in Figure 14-2
...
Those who describe themselves as hybrid
business-IT personnel account for 23% of respondents
...
When viewing
responses only for business users, the importance of Microsoft Office
integration moves to the top of the list, while alerting moves down
...
For
example, IT professionals have been burned in the past by the thousands
of disconnected spreadsheets and the ensuing data chaos
...
In a similar fashion, if you are a BlackBerry
user, you may rate Mobile BI high
...
(Results based on 51 responses
...
A number of companies are not yet on the latest releases,
though, and still use client/server BI deployments
...

At The Data Warehousing Institute’s (TDWI) Executive Summit in
February 2007, I participated in a panel on the role of emerging technologies in extending the reach and impact of business intelligence
...
Attendees could vote on a limited
number of items that they thought would have the biggest impact in the
next few years
...
The things that got few to no votes were BI
search, dashboards, and rich Internet applications, contrary to what I
believe will have the biggest impact
...
In this way, we sometimes don’t know the impact
any of these capabilities will have until the technology has become
more mature and the industry understands it better
...
Recent BI innovations must go through a similar process of the industry first understanding their potential, accepting

202

Chapter 14

or rejecting them, and then either embracing or adopting the innovations in a limited fashion
...
Recall from
Chapter 12 (see Figure 12-4), thousands of individual decisions can
have as big, if not bigger, an impact on a company than a single decision
...

Figure 14-3 provides a framework for evaluating changes in BI
technology to determine which new and emerging capabilities will prove
most valuable to your company, how mature they are, and when to
monitor them or when to embrace and actively deploy them (adapted
from TDWI’s Technology Evaluation Framework)
...
Recall from the
section on BI users as a percentage of employees in Chapter 4 that the
average usage of BI within a company is currently at 25%, and even if
budget were available and the deployment were wildly successful, survey
respondents felt the use rate would extend only to 54% of employees
...
Business impact and BI
prevalence are not linearly correlated, however
...
Another
enabling technology such as BI embedded in operational processes may
affect thousands of users, each of whom makes dozens of decisions on a
daily basis; the monetary value of these individual decisions may be small
when measured in isolation, but enormous when taken in aggregate
...
The bigger the bubble and darker the
shading, the bigger the impact on a single decision or person
...

Adopt Where Appropriate Items in the lower-right quadrant show
innovations that are mature but that may serve only specific segments
of users
...

Evaluate and Test Items in the upper-left quadrant are relatively
new but will have a profound impact on user adoption
...
The technology is very new and not well understood
...

Monitor and Understand Items in the lower-left quadrant are so
new that they may be riskier investments
...


Figure 14-3 portrays broad industry maturity of these capabilities
and the degree to which most vendors offer the capabilities
...
All items are in the context of business intelligence as a technology
...


204

Chapter 14

The subsequent sections describe these capabilities that have not
otherwise been addressed in Chapters 2 and 3
...
These technologies are well established and are used in a number
of different applications such as fraud detection, customer scoring, risk
analysis, and campaign management
...
Traditionally, predictive analytics
has been a backroom task performed by a limited few statisticians who
would take a snapshot of the data (either from a data warehouse or from
a purpose-built extract from the source system), build a model, test a
model, finalize it, and then somehow disseminate the results
...
This does not mean that predictive analytics software
will become “mainstream,” but rather that the results of such analyses
can be readily incorporated into everyday reports and decision making
...

Predictive analytic tools from different vendors do continue to differ
significantly in how they work and in what information is stored in the
database versus calculated and presented in a report or incorporated
into an operational process
...
1
Market basket analysis helps retailers understand which products sell together and provide product recommendations
...
So if a customer ordered a stapler, the online store would recommend a staple remover as the marketing team had marked this as a
complementary product
...
With the manually associated product
recommendations, there was no significant impact on sales
...
The model analyzes past shopping carts and produces

The Future of Business Intelligence

205

recommendations to ensure the greatest lift
...

Dow Chemical also has begun extending the reach of predictive
analytics with SAS’s JMP product (pronounced “jump”), a solution that
combines visual analysis with statistics
...
Through these tools and the data in the data
warehouse, Dow began looking at the high cost of railroad shipments:
$400 million annually across North America
...
By benchmarking current payments versus
industry norms, the analysis showed Dow was overpaying by 20%, or
$80 million
...

For both Corporate Express and Dow Chemical, the move to predictive analytics has been evolutionary
...
While both companies have been doing statistical analysis
for decades, the degree to which predictive analytics has now been
incorporated into daily processes (online store at Corporate Express and
purchasing negotiations at Dow Chemical) reflects the degree to which
predictive analytics has shifted from the backroom to the front line, with
the most casual of users deriving value from such analytics
...

A more complete set of information to support decision making, with
the integration of structured (quantitative) and unstructured content
(textual)
...
Unstructured content refers to information stored in textual comment fields, documents, annual reports, websites, and so on
...


Text analytics is closely related to search in that unstructured information or text can be transformed into quantitative data
...
Text analytics is the
numerical analysis of textual information
...
They don’t know what’s available
or where
...
” Some of the most
valuable information is hidden in textual data
...
Picture a Google interface to BI
...
The added benefit is that in addition to displaying reports coming from the BI server, the search engine
will also list textual information that may be relevant—a customer letter,
sales call notes, headline news
...
Never before has such unstructured data been so nicely
accessible with structured or quantitative data
...
According to Tony Byrne, founder/president of CMS
Watch, a technology evaluation firm focusing on enterprise search and
content management systems, search as a technology has existed for
more than 50 years
...
In
many respects, the success of consumer search has helped spur hype
around enterprise search, in which companies deploy search technology
internally to search myriad document repositories
...
The convergence of search with business intelligence first
emerged in 2006
...
To
illustrate the point, note that BI search was selected by only 27% of the
Successful BI Survey respondents as a capability that would help foster
greater success (see earlier Figure 14-1)
...

The incorporation of text analytics with traditional business intelligence is still in its infancy
...
Again, both technologies independent of
BI have existed for decades; it is that convergence with BI that is new
...

The number of customers taking advantage of the BI Search and text
analytics integration is only a handful
...
5 BCBS of TN is
a not-for-profit provider of health insurance
...
6 Managing claims and
negotiating rates with providers is critical in ensuring BCBS can meet
its obligations to the members it insures
...
8 Given how new the technology is, Brooks asked their
BI vendor, Cognos, along with IBM (who produces the search solution
OmniFind) and SAS (who offers text analytics solution Text Miner)
to work together to develop several prototypes and show the business
users the concept of bringing BI, enterprise search, and text analytics
together
...
There has been a high degree of collaboration between BCBS of TN and its information technology partners

208

Chapter 14

to understand the new capabilities, develop the right infrastructure, and
optimize the indexes to provide the best search performance
...
BCBS of TN evaluated the capabilities for more than a year
before developing plans for implementing in production
...
They also
support some kind of conditional formatting of data: display positive
numbers in green, display negative numbers in red, and enlarge those
with the worst variances
...

Bullet graphs, a construct by Stephen Few that includes a target indicator within the bar chart
...

Small multiples, which are series of small, similar graphics or charts
...

Heat maps that display two variables as different intensifying colors
...

Geographic maps that display things such as sales figures in a map
form, using color to highlight sales performance
...


Advanced visualization software and capabilities also help you apply
best practices in data visualization, even for basic visualizations
...
The
dense page of numbers may not help facilitate insight, but they are what
users are accustomed to
...
Figure 14-4
shows several charts created in Tableau Software
...
The dimensions (time and region) and scale within
each graph are the same, allowing for a rapid comparison
...
By toggling the
quick filters (shown on the right in Figure 14-4), it’s possible to focus
on the individual customer segments to see that technology sales to corporations are on a steady decline, whereas consumer and small business
segments show strength
...
As
well, if I am uncertain as to the best way to display the information,
advanced visualization software can make suggestions
...
Users must rely on specialty products
...
In
this regard, the emphasis for BI tools is changing from a focus of simply
“getting to the data” to “what insights can I discover from the data and
how can the most information be displayed in the smallest space
...
“Active reports,” “on-report formatting,” and “navigable reports”
are similar terms that also don’t fully capture the value of this capability
...
So after much thought
and brainstorming with some colleagues, I will refer to this capability as
“rich reportlets
...

Rich reportlets are powered by Web 2
...
When BI suites were first re-architected
for the Web, report consumers could only view a static page
...
Less sophisticated users would submit requests to
IT or to the BI team to modify the report design
...
With rich reportlets, someone accesses a report over the
Web but in a much more interactive and appealing way
...
With the use of either Adobe Flex
or Macromedia Flash, these reports come to life in ways that make
business intelligence fun
...
Such animation makes BI appealing as well as insightful as
users see the trend in action
...

This type of interactivity affects all BI users, whether casual or
power users
...
A lot! The ability to interact with
the data in a simple and intuitive way facilitates greater insight at the
hands of the decision maker
...
Lastly, the cost
of ownership is lowered because a single reportlet can be “tweaked” to
that decision maker’s needs, without IT having to maintain thousands
of individualized reports
...
In discussing future plans with many of the case study companies, much of their concern was not about technology, but rather, in
finding new ways to use BI to address common business problems
...
With success, of course, comes greater
demands on the systems and the people
...
One business leader expressed frustration at his department’s inability to make
wise investments, while witnessing other departments, working in more
unison and getting more value from business intelligence
...
“To have one screen I can get
to with a single click, that shows sales, margin, price, opportunities in
graphical form, with drill down—that would be magic!” His comments
remind me that the technology is sometimes the easy part; getting the

212

Chapter 14

organization aligned is harder
...


Words of Wisdom
I hope this book will inspire you to ensure business intelligence has a
profound impact on your organization
...
Business intelligence is all encompassing in its ability
to improve an organization’s efficiency, competitiveness, and opportunities
...
Following
are some words of wisdom that I hope will inspire and guide you as you
strive to make business intelligence a wild success in your company
...
Even then, there is an education that needs to happen—
getting people to think business intelligence
...
Ray Iannaconne, vice president of operations,
Emergency Medical Associates
“Senior management needs to take a leap of faith
...
”
—Mike Gorman, senior director of customer relations,
Continental Airlines
“The data is compelling
...
We haven’t
proven the market wants this system
...
”
—Jeff Kennedy, CEO, FlightStats
“Implementing an integrated reporting system for the company was a
significant undertaking, but the result, Dow’s Shared Data Network, is
now a fundamental building block to managing Dow on a global basis
...
”
—Dave Kepler, CIO, The Dow Chemical Company

The Future of Business Intelligence

213

“Strong management and a cultural change have most contributed to our
success
...
In adopting this cultural change
to one of accountability, sometimes we had to change the people
...

I see BI providing new insights into the business and serving as an
enabler to profitable growth in the future
...
We are always tweaking things
...
It’s made
us more agile as a company
...
The full survey is included here
...
The survey was promoted through multiple media
outlets and elicited 513 qualified responses
...
Click here for terms of use
...
The
results of the survey will be published in an upcoming book Successful
Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI A Killer App (published by
McGraw Hill, due November 2007)
...
I will also
email you a key survey finding, ahead of the book’s release
...
These technologies
include both the backend data warehouse systems and the front-end
user tools
...
I thank you in advance for your invaluable insights!

Sincerely,
Cindi Howson
Founder, BIScorecard®

This Successful BI Survey

217

1
...
How successful do you consider your current business
intelligence deployment?
❍ Very Successful
❍ Moderately Successful
❍ Mostly a failure

3
...
How do you define the success or failure for your BI
deployment? (select all that apply)
❑ Return on investment
❑ User perception that it is mission critical
❑ Support of key stake holders
❑ Number of defined users
❑ Percentage of active users
❑ Cost savings
❑ Improved business performance
❑ Better access to data
Additional comments:
_______________________________________________________________________

218

Appendix A

5
...

_______________________________________________________________________

6
...
How would you describe the front-end BI tools:
❍ We use multiple modules (query, reporting, OLAP) primarily
from a single vendor
❍ We use multiple modules (query, reporting, OLAP) from
multiple vendors
❍ We mostly custom develop our own BI front ends

8
...
How does your company view BI (data warehousing,
query, reporting, analysis, dashboards) and
performance management (budgeting, planning,
financial consolidation, and strategic scorecards)?
❍ Separate initiatives
❍ Closely related but separate projects and people address
those needs
❍ One initiative with solutions provided via the same group
Additional comments:
_______________________________________________________________________

This Successful BI Survey

219

10
...
If your BI deployment were wildly successful and
you had available budget, what percent of company
employees should have access to a BI tool?
_________________________________________________________________________

12
...
Please use the drop-down menus to
select a percentage in increments of 10
...
Is your CIO or IT Manager an active member of the
corporate business team or operating committee?
❍ Yes
❍ No
❍ Not Sure

220

Appendix A

14
...
Who is the primary sponsor of your BI initiative?
❍ Chief Operating Officer (COO)
❍ Chief Executive Officer (CEO)
❍ Chief Information Officer (CIO) or IT Manager
❍ Chief Financial Officer (CFO)
❍ Marketing VP
❍ Other Line of business leader

16
...
How much do these technical items affect the
success of your BI deployment?
Very
Not Very
No
Essential Important Important Important Impact
Availability of relevant
subject areas

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

Data Quality clean data

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

Appropriate and
effective BI tools

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

Incorporation of BI into
operational processes

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

Reliability of the
BI system

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

Fast query
response time

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

BI system is continuously
improved (data and tools)

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

Data warehouse updates
are near realtime

❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

18
...
How would you describe your company culture?
Strongly
Strongly
Agree Agree Neutral Disagree Disagree
Access to data is overly
controlled, and executives
fear workers know too much
...


❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

We are innovative and always
looking for ways to do things
better
...


❍

❍

❍

❍

❍

We use computers and
information technology to
achieve competitive advantage
...
Which emerging technologies do you think will help
you achieve greater success? (select all that apply)
❑ Web-based BI tools
❑ Dashboards

This Successful BI Survey

223

❑ Scorecards
❑ Search-enabled BI (Google interface to BI)
❑ Microsoft Office-enabled BI (Excel/PowerPoint integrated
with BI)
❑ Greater interactivity within fixed reports (filter, rank, drill)
❑ Predictive analytics
❑ Getting to more data in different sources
❑ Alert notification for problems and exceptions – proactive
monitoring
❑ Integration with mobile devices such as Blackberries
❑ BI embedded in operational tasks

21
...
Any other insights or comments you wish to provide
on why your BI initiative is succeeding or failing?
_______________________________________________________________________
_______________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________

23
...
Which best describes your business unit or
functional unit
❍ Finance
❍ Sales
❍ Marketing
❍ Customer Service
❍ Corporate IT
❍ Operations
❍ Manufacturing
❍ Human Resources
❍ Supply Chain/Logistics/Shipping
❍ Purchasing
❍ Other (please specify)
If you selected other please specify:
_______________________________________________________________________

25
...
What is the number of employees in your company?
❍ 1-100
❍ 101-1000
❍ 1001-5000
❍ Greater than 5000

27
...
Please select your Country location from the
drop-down list:

29
...


30
...
The survey
results will be aggregated and used for an upcoming
book
...
May we quote you?
❍ Yes, you may quote me
❍ No, you may not quote me

THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION!
As a way of thanking you for your participation in this survey, your name
will be entered in a random drawing to win a BOSE headset or a copy
of the book
...
Winners will be
notified by email in May 2007
...
Some are relevant to a specific vendor’s solution and some
are more conceptual in nature
...
Click here for terms of use
...
intelligententerprise
...
com)
The Data Warehousing Institute (www
...
org)

Notes

Chapter 1
1
...

2
...
HarperCollins: 2001, page 79
...
Walt Disney World presentation, Business Objects User Conference,
2005
...
Computerworld Technology Briefing, “The Business Value of
Analytics
...
Continental Airlines, interview notes, April 2005
...
Information Builders press release, March 19, 2007
...
Thomas, Kim, “Humberside Police Updates Criminal Intelligence
Databases,” Computing, March 15, 2007
...
Opportunity International website and Hyperion user conference,
April 2005
...
Vesset, Wilhilde, McDonough, “Worldwide Business Analytics Software
2006-2010 Forecast and 2005 Vendor Shares,” IDC, July 2006
...
Age Positive Team, Department for Work and Pensions, UK, News,
July 28, 2006
...
“Shifting Workforce Demographics and Delayed Retirement,”
Microsoft, October 18, 2006
...
Horrigan, John, “A Typology of Information and Communication
Technology Users,” Pew Internet & American Life Project, May 7,
2007
...
Adapted from timeline developed by Wayne Eckerson, TDWI, for course
“Evaluating BI Toolsets,” co-taught with Cindi Howson, May 2003
...
Vesset, McDonough, “The Next Wave of Business Analytics,” DM
Review, March 2007
...
Mearian, Lucas, “A zettabyte by 2010: Corporate Data grows fiftyfold
in three years,” Computerworld, March 6, 2007
...
McGee, M
...
” January 8, 2007
...
Click here for terms of use
...
Loshin, David, “Master Data and Master Data Management: An
Introduction,” DataFlux Whitepaper
...
Watson, Hugh, “Which Data Warehouse Architecture Is Most
Successful,” Business Intelligence Journal, Q1 2006
...
TDWI, What Works, November 2006, “Enhancing the Customer
Experience and Improving Retention Using Powerful Data Warehousing
Appliances
...
Groff, James and Weinberg, Paul, SQL: The Complete Reference:
McGraw-Hill/Osborne: 2002, p 4
...
Few, Stephen, Information Dashboard Design, O’Reilly: 2006, p 34
...
Schiff, Craig, “Fact vs
...

4
...


Chapter 4
1
...

2
...

3
...

4
...

5
...
, “The Financial Impact of Business Analytics, an
IDC ROI Study,” December 2002
...
Wixom, et al
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...

11
...

12
...

13
...


Notes

231

14
...

15
...


Chapter 5
1
...
com
...
Computerworld Honors Program 2005
...
Richardson, Karen, “Keeping accounting close to home,” The Wall
Street Journal, October 29, 2006
...
FlightStats, interview notes, April 2007
...
DOT, Bureau of Transportation Statistics website
...
about
...
htm?site=http://www
...
gov/airconsumer)
...
FlightStats, interview notes, April 2007
...
FlightStats website (www
...
com)
...
“On-Time Performance: Flight Delays at a Glance,” Bureau of
Transportation Statistics, May 2007, (http://www
...
bts
...
asp)
...
JetBlue website, “An Apology From David Neeleman,” February 2007,
(http://www
...
com/about/ourcompany/apology/index
...

10
...

11
...

12
...

13
...

14
...

15
...

16
...

17
...

18
...

19
...

20
...

21
...

22
...

23
...
jointcommission
...

24
...


232

Notes

Chapter 6
1
...

Helping Your Board Get ‘IT,’” 2005
...
Gillooly, Brian, “CIO: Time to Step Up,” Information Week, June 4,
2007
...
Lutchen, Mark, Managing IT as a Business, Wiley: 2004, p 33
...
Corporate Express, interview notes, May–June 2007
...
English, Larry, “Do We Need a Clean Information Quality Act?,”
Business Intelligence Network, May 9, 2007
...
English, Larry, “Plain English about Information Quality: Information
Quality Tipping Point,” DM Review, January 2007
...
Gartner press release, “Dirty Data is a Business Problem, Not an IT
Problem,” March 2, 2007
...
Russom, Philip, “Taking Data Quality to the Enterprise through Data
Governance,” March 2006
...
Costa, Mike, board of directors, Central Michigan University Research
Corporation, interview notes, May 2007
...
Harry, Mikel, Schroeder, Richard, Six Sigma: The Breakthrough
Management Strategy Revolutionizing the World’s Top Corporations,
Doubleday: 2000
...
Ibid, p 14
...
Department of Transportation, “Airline On-Time Performance Slips,
Cancellations and Mishandled Bags Up in June,” August 6, 2007
...
Norway Post, interview notes, May 2007
...
Norway Post presentation, Hyperion user conference, April 2006
...
Ariyachandra, Thilini and Watson, Hugh, “Which Data Warehouse
Architecture is Most Successful,” Business Intelligence Journal, First
Quarter 2006
...
Linstedt, Dan, “Inmon vs
...

13
...

14
...

15
...

16
...


Notes

233

17
...

18
...


Chapter 8
1
...
168 Feng Shui Advisors, Yin and Yang Theory (web site)
3
...
D
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...
Jacknis, Dr
...

10
...

11
...

12
...

13
...


Chapter 9
1
...

2
...
S
...

3
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...


234

Notes

8
...

9
...

10
...
, “Continental Airlines Flies High with Real-time Business
Intelligence,” p 9
...
Levitt, Steven and Dubner, Stephen, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist
Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, HarperCollins Publishers:
2005, p 7
...
Raden, Neil, “Toppling the BI Pyramid,” DM Review, January 2007
...
Heldman, Kim, Project Management Professional Study Guide, Sybex:
2002 and confirmed by a PMP certified in 2006
...
http://www
...
org/history
...

3
...
ambysoft
...
html
...
Watson, Hugh, “Are Data Warehouses Prone to Failure?,” TDWI
Journal, Fall 2005, 454 respondents
...
Interview notes, 1-800 CONTACTS, May 2007
...
Wikipedia
...
Wayne Eckerson & Cindi Howson, “Enterprise Business Intelligence,”
TDWI Report Series, August 2005
...
http://www
...
org/tquotes
...

4
...
, “Continental Airlines Flies High with Real-Time
Business Intelligence,” p 22
...
1-800 CONTACTS, interview notes and e-mails, April 2007 and
September 2007
...
Miller et al
...

7
...

8
...

9
...

10
...

11
...
1-800 CONTACTS, interview notes, April 2007
...
Eckerson & Howson, “Enterprise BI,” TDWI, July 2006
...
Wayne Eckerson & Cindi Howson, “Enterprise Business Intelligence,”
TDWI Report Series, August 2005
...
Eckerson & Howson, “Enterprise BI,” TDWI, July 2006
...
Microsoft User Conference, May 2007
...
Taylor, James and Raden, Neil, Smart Enough Systems, Prentice Hall:
2007, p 15
...
Jim Jelter, “Kodak restates, adds $9 million to loss,” MarketWatch,
Nov 9, 2005
...
RedEnvelope Cuts Outlook, Shares Fall, CFO Eric Wong Resigns
Amid Budget Errors, NEW YORK (AP), March 29, 2005
...

2
...

4
...

Corporate Express, interview notes, June 2007
...

Hammond et al
...


Chapter 14
1
...

2
...

3
...

4
...

5
...

6
...

7
...

8
...

9
...


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Index

1-800 CONTACTS case study, 18, 82,
121, 162
agile development at, 147–148
BI steering committee at, 156
BI tools used by, 172
experience with frustration, 81–82
impact of good timing on, 85
personalization at, 135–136
real-time BI at, 112
relevance at, 128–131
and right-time business intelligence, 110
accounting systems, 22
ad hoc query tools, 35–37, 180–181
Adopt Where Appropriate evaluation, 203
advanced visualization, 208–210
aggregate tables, role in data warehouses, 31
agile development
at 1-800 CONTACTS, 147–148
best practices for, 148
state of, 144
techniques for, 142–144
waterfall approach, 139–142
versus waterfall approach, 145
Agile Manifesto, 143
airlines, use of BI by, 4–5
alignment versus partnership, 123
analysis latency, 110
analytic applications, 50
analytic job content, degree of, 177–178
appliances, role in data warehouses, 34
Ariyachandra, Thilini, 106–107
Bachenheimer, Eric, 196
bankruptcy, occurrence at Continental
Airlines, 84
BCBS (BlueCross BlueShield), adoption of
BI Search and text analytics, 207–208
benefits of BI, focusing on, 190–192
best practices for successful BI, 20, 163
agile development, 148
BI architecture, 34
BI deployments, 68–69
BI front-end, 51
BI tools, 163

business-IT relationship, 125–126
data quality, 114
executive support, 98
future of BI, 182
LOFT effect, 87
organizational issues, 155
relevance, 137
threats to data quality, 113
Bethune, Gordon, 83
BI (business intelligence)
...
Click here for terms of use
...
0 technologies, 12–13
BI applications
Continental Airlines, 6
Dow Chemical, 7
EMA (Emergency Medical Associates), 6
hospitality company, 7
Norway Post, 5
oil and gas company, 5
Opportunity International, 6
police departments, 6
promoting, 192–195
school systems, 6
Whirlpool, 6
BI architecture
best practices for, 34
conceptualizing, 21
making changes in, 140
BI capabilities, promoting, 188–192
BI components, acquiring from
BI vendors, 169
BI deployments
best practices for, 68–69
and business performance, 56–58
executive sponsorship of, 89–90
failure of, 171, 184
rating, 53–55
success of, 163
BI environment, servers and networks in,
33–34
BI front-end
...
See BI (business
intelligence)
The Business Intelligence Network, 14,
193, 228
business performance
and BI deployment, 56–58
evaluating, 54–55
improving with BI, 3–4
business query and reporting tools, 35–39
versus OLAP tools, 41
versus production reporting, 40
business requirements, mapping to
opportunities, 79–81
business units, performance issues with, 150
business view, importance of, 37–38
business-IT relationship, best practices for,
125–126
BusinessObjects, 165–167
businesspeople versus IT people, 117–118
...
See successful BI case studies
CEO (chief executive officer), considering as
sponsor, 91–92
CFO (chief financial offer), support of, 92–94
changes, treatment in waterfall approach, 141
CIO (chief information officer)
changing role of, 93
considering as sponsor, 91–92
Clarry, Maureen, 121
Cognos, role in BI Search and text
analytics, 207
Cognos 8 Metrics Studio, strategy map
created with, 47
Cognos PowerPlay, 166–167
Collins, Jim, 162, 184
commitment, encouraging, 161
company newsletters, promoting BI
applications through, 194
computers, widespread use of, 9
Conductive Technology, 75
conferences, promoting BI applications
through, 194

239

CONNECT, 121
consumer search technology, 206
Continental Airlines case study, 18–19,
59–60
...
See also fact-based
decision making
applying BI to, 174–176, 184–185
at EMA (Emergency Medical
Associates), 185
errors in, 185
Decision Support System (DSS), 74
departmental versus enterprise BI, 149–155
digital data, volume of, 10–13
dimension tables, role in data warehouses, 31
Disney World, use of BI by, 5
DOLAP (Dynamic OLAP), 42
Dow Chemical Company case study, 18,
73, 152
...
See BI technologies
EMP (enterprise performance
management), 48
employees, investing in and hiring, 160
ENECO Energie, success of, 95–96
English, Larry, 100
Enron, 186
enterprise search technology, 206
enterprise versus departmental BI, 149–155
ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems,
22–23
and BI tools, 178
maintaining codes and hierarchies in, 109
ERP implementations, basis of, 28
ERP/operational systems versus data
warehouses/data marts, 29
ETL (extract, transform, and load), 25
Evaluate and Test evaluation, 203
Excel
ranking of, 181
using as interface to OLAP data, 43–44
executive sponsors, role of, 97–98
executive support
best practices for, 98
choosing sponsors of, 91–94
at Corporate Express, 92–93
expecting changes in, 94
garnering, 20, 95
and success, 89–91
at Successful BI case studies, 94
expectations, managing, 96–97
extract, transform, and load (ETL), 25
F (future) calculation, including in ROI, 61
fact tables, role in data warehouses, 30–31
fact-based decision making, 184–186
...
S
...

See also BI front-end
frustration
exploiting, 97
role in LOFT, 81–82
voices of, 115–116
Fund the Future, 83
future
beyond technology, 211–212
predicting, 204–205

241

Garby, Jens, 74
Gladwell, Malcolm, 186
Global Reporting Project, 72–73, 75, 120,
152, 165–166
Go Forward Plan, 83, 124
...

See also businesspeople versus
IT people
INCA (Infrastructure for Code
Administration), 109
incentive compensation, changing, 122
incentives, significance of, 134–135
industry journals, promoting BI applications
through, 194
information overload, occurrence of,
10–13
information quality, rating, 100
information requirements,
predictability of, 176
Inmon, Bill, 106–107
Inmon, William, 72, 106–107, 227
Intelligent Enterprise, 14, 228
internal user conferences, promoting BI
applications through, 194
IT (information technology)
attitudes toward, 9
as yin versus business as yang, 116–118
IT developers, use of production reporting
tools by, 39
IT investment priority, BI as, 7
IT people versus businesspeople, 117–119
...
(luck), 71
level 5 leaders, BI team leaders as, 162–163
Linstedt, Dan, 107
LOFT effect, 20, 71
best practices, 87
best practices for, 87
frustration, 81–82, 97, 115–116
luck, 71–75
opportunity, 75–81
success without, 86–87
threat, 82–85
lookup tables, role in data warehouses, 31
luck, role in LOFT effect, 71–73
...
See also LOFT effect
at Dow Chemical Company, 79
at EMA (Emergency Medical
Associates), 79
mapping to business requirements, 79–81
role in LOFT, 75–81
Opportunity International, use of BI by, 6
organizational issues, best practices for, 155
organizational model for BI, 157
organizational structures, considering,
122–123
P (Perceiving) personality type, 117
partnerships
versus alignment, 123
improving, 121–123
patient care, improving via relevance, 130–133
peer networking session, hosting, 19
people, investing in and hiring, 160
performance, improving with BI, 3–4
performance indicators, management of, 47
performance management (PM), 48–49
personality tests, 117–118
personalization, 135–136
Pew Internet & American Life Project, 9
planning processes, 49
PM (performance management), 48–49
podcasts, promoting BI applications
through, 193
police departments, use of BI by, 6

Index
portals, promoting BI applications
through, 195
predictive analytic tools, 204–205
process improvement, BI for, 5
ProClarity’s decomposition tree, 44
product names, examples of, 192–193
production reporting, 39–40
promotional media
brown-bag lunches, 194, 196
company newsletters, 194
industry journals, 194
internal user conferences, 194
podcasts, 193
portals, 195
road shows, 193
staff meetings, 195
t-shirt days, 194–195
video clips, 193
quality, relationship to project scope, 145
R (discount rate) calculation, including in
ROI, 61
Raden, Neil, 175
real-time BI, examples of, 112
reference tables, role in data warehouses, 31
relevance, 10
at 1-800 CONTACTS, 128–131
best practices for, 137
at Continental Airlines, 133–134
definition of, 127
EMA (Emergency Medical Associates),
130–133
finding, 20
reporting, 36, 39–40, 210–211
...

See also waterfall approach
resources
role in BI project management, 145–146
sharing, 163
restaurants, use of BI by, 5
return on investment (ROI)
average for BI projects, 59
calculating, 60–61
formula for, 61
as measure of success, 61
projection of, 59–60
Reynolds, Anne Marie, 59–60
rich reportlets, 210–211
right-time business intelligence,
110–112
road shows, promoting BI applications
through, 193
ROI (return on investment)
average for BI projects, 59
calculating, 60–61
derivation of, 53
formula for, 61

243

as measure of success, 61
projection of, 59–60
ROLAP (Relational OLAP), 42
Rothman, Jonathan, 130, 185
row-level security, personalizing data
with, 135
S (Sensing) personality type, 117
SaaS (Software as a Service) model, 34
sales systems, 22
Schiff, Craig (performance management), 48
school systems, use of BI by, 6
Schwartz, Matt, 159
scope, role in BI project management,
145–146
scorecards, 46–47, 131
Scott, Walter, 160
self-assessment worksheet, developing user
segments with, 174
servers, role in BI environment, 33–34
Shepherd, Denise, 84
Six Sigma management strategy, use of,
102–103
Smart Enough Systems, 175–176
snowflake design, 31
Software as a Service (SaaS) model, 34
source systems, 22–24
spreadsheet errors, problems with, 181
spreadsheet users, BI tools for, 179
SQL (Structured Query Language), 38
staff meetings, promoting BI
applications through, 195
standardization, 168–173
Stavropoulos, Bill, 74
strategic decisions, applying BI to, 174–175
Strategic Path, 14
strategic scorecards, metrics in, 47
Structured Query Language (SQL), 38
success
...
See also Dow Chemical Company
case study
successful BI case studies
1-800 CONTACTS, 18, 82, 85, 110,
156, 162, 172
BI tools used by, 172
Continental Airlines, 18–19, 59–60,
156, 172
Corporate Express, 18, 66, 97, 159–160,
172, 204–205
The Dow Chemical Company, 18
Dow Chemical Company, 71–73, 109,
152, 165, 167, 172, 205
EMA (Emergency Medical Associates),
19, 172
FlightStats, 18, 76–78, 105–106,
111, 172
gathering stories of, 19
Norway Post, 18, 57, 104–105, 172

244

Index

successful BI case studies (cont
...
See also
BI (business intelligence)
analysis of results, 14
demographics, 15
duration of, 13–15
rating BI deployment in, 53–54
summary tables, role in data warehouses, 31
supply chain systems, 22
SWOT analysis, performing, 87
T (Thinker) personality type, 117
Tableau Software, advanced visualization
example, 208–209
Tables
benefits of BI, 190
BI product names, 193
BI tools for successful BI case studies, 172
buying BI products, 170
enterprise BI, 154
executive level sponsors, 94
fixes and ad hoc reports, 36
OLAP architectures, 42
production reporting tools versus
business query tools, 40
real-time BI, 112
successful BI deployment, 55
taglines, 191
transaction systems versus data
warehouses, 29
tables, normalized tables, 31–32
tables in data warehouses
aggregate tables, 31
dimension tables, 31
fact tables, 30–31
lookup tables, 31
reference tables, 31
summary tables, 31
tactical decisions, applying BI to, 175
taglines, 191
talent, investing in and hiring, 160
Taylor, James, 175
TDWI conference
emerging technologies session at,
201–202
peer networking session at, 19
team building
exercise, 191
supporting, 122
technical literacy, BI tools related to,
178–179
technologies
...
See also LOFT effect
to data quality, 113
role in LOFT effect, 82–86
time
role in BI project management,
145–146
role in success, 85–86
time to action, reducing via data latency,
110
tragedy of the commons, 153
training, 195–197
transaction processing systems, 22–23
transaction systems
versus data warehouses, 29
storage of data in, 31–32
travel, BI tools related to, 179
travel agents, use of BI by, 4–5
truth, multiple versions of, 82
t-shirt days, promoting BI applications
through, 194–195
user segments, developing, 174
users
...
See also
requirements-driven BI
Watson, Hugh, 106–107, 145
Watson, Thomas, 64
Web 2

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