Enhancing Intelligence with Less As the economy forces organizations to reduce headcount and cut budgets, IT and business units are being asked to do more with less. In attempting to tackle this challenge, the natural approach is to look at new or yet-completed projects as the first candidates for cancellation or postponement without taking a hard look at what that may do to the ability to meet strategic business and IT goals in the short, mid, and long term. With a focus on Business Intelligence, we’ll take a closer look at some of the initiatives that may require some continued funding in the near-term, but that will result in exponential return in value in the future. Here are 5 things that you can invest in today in order to differ, reduce, and avoid IT cost, and maybe even look like a hero in the process.

• Understand Current State/Baseline BI Capabilities

• Create a Roadmap

• Sunset Mainframe Hardware

• Compile a Sourcing Strategy

• Move to Common Toolsets

• Dabble with Open Source

Understand Current State/Baseline BI Capabilities will help to support a more comprehensive understanding of where inefficiencies may exist. BI Best Practices should be leveraged to assess the integration of information throughout the enterprise. This exercise would look at every system or process that is providing information either to end users or to other downstream automated processes or systems. The dimensions that would be reviewed for each of the systems or processes would be:

• Business Unit Interaction

• Organization

• Governance

• Roles, and Responsibilities

• Program/Project Management

• Technical, Data, Data Integration (ETL), and Reporting Architecture

This is an activity that can be done at relatively low cost and will help to highlight overlaps or redundancy, ineffective systems or process, and data/information challenges. The

output of this exercise can also be used to support budget or funding conversations by providing a comprehensive scorecard that identifies both tactical and strategic opportunities for improvement of the current BI environment or capabilities.

Create a Roadmap to avoid project overrun, re-work of systems, redundant datasets, and lack of user adoption. It’s imperative to have a well defined future state vision and phased roadmap that allows you to incrementally evolve your BI capabilities without crashing and burning on the first rollout. The purpose is to gather the comprehensive current state view, functional, technical and information requirements of the business community and generate an actionable implementation plan. The information needs of the business should be prioritized and the data required is assessed for availability and quality. Next, the information and analytical capabilities are then mapped into a future state technical architecture. Organization and process changes are recommended based on functional drivers as well as potential impacts to the technical architecture. The resulting roadmap provides a phased plan (not big bang) for addressing the in-scope subject areas and associated technology components. Aside from the strategic initiatives, based on business drivers, outlined in the roadmap will likely also include tactical projects to allow for quicker delivery of value to the business community while still progressing toward the strategic end-state vision (think short-cycle quick wins)

In addition to foundational business and technology requirements, there are a few best practices that should be considered for inclusion as they will provide tremendous impact and increasing value to the business:

• Data Lineage – having an audit trail in a central location that contains details of how data is transformed between source and report.

• Data Governance – management of information that allows for consistent definition of metrics across the enterprise as well as a de facto decision of what should be used as the system of record for common data that may exist in multiple source systems.

• Audit, Balance, and Control – a framework that provides the complete audit trail of every job run as part of a cycle, balancing of expected input and output of each job to ensure that records aren’t lost, and financial balancing of data at every sensible point between source and report. When custom error thresholds have been exceeded, all process jobs stop to allow for clean-up where the issue occurred instead of in the target data warehouse, reporting universe, or reports.

Once the end state vision has been defined, a business case, a ballpark pricing of each roadmap phase, and a high-level timeline for implementation of the roadmap should be included as part of the final package used for funding conversations. Having this

information will allow you to make more informed decisions about where to spend diminished budgets without compromising business value..

Sunset Mainframe Hardware makes sense due to the low cost of UNIX servers and storage systems compared to legacy mainframes. By moving applications off of legacy mainframe servers and into a distributed environment, can not only provide significant maintenance cost savings, but also a significant reduction in development and support resource costs due to greater availability and lower cost of resources.

Compile a Sourcing Strategy not just an offshoring decision viewed as an easy way to rapidly cut costs, but too often, the transition offshore is done without careful planning and preparation. This quest for quick near-term cost benefits may be creating significant long-term risks. Experience has shown that successful sourcing requires an appropriate degree of analysis in order to adequately assess the risks associated with the potential rewards. While there’s a general misconception that the time from sourcing analysis to implementation must be long and drawn out, a well structured sourcing analysis can actually be achieved in a relatively short period of time. A strategic sourcing plan can set the foundation for success by providing for short-term cost reduction, longer-term efficiency gains, and effective risk mitigation.

Move to Common Toolsets because BI environments that grew from the cobbling together of disparate business unit or subject area systems typically leverage many different database, ETL, and reporting tools. This results in the IT organization needing to maintain a greater number of specialized resources just to provide support to the business community. This also results in the business community having to wait longer for each data-related request to be fulfilled since it requires the IT organization to execute each need. Due to this lack of ease in accessing data, business units begin to fulfill their own data requests using Excel and Access and “Shadow IT” emerges. By addressing a proliferation of different software tools and making tool centralization and standardization as part of your BI roadmap, you can work towards not only providing a one-stop shop for all information needs, but you can train the business community on the toolset and allow them to fulfill their own data and reporting needs. This not only allows for easier adoption of BI initiatives by the business community, but it requires fewer full time IT staff to support information requests.

Dabble with Open Source, it is never too late to test drive new and ‘free’ technology. A quick and easy way to bring your business users and IT team up-to-speed is by tinkering with software. With open source options proving themselves in the market place, now is a great time to start. There is little to no up-front investment to get some of these packages into a ‘pilot’ stage. Understanding new features, increased data visualization, and different

reporting views can easily increase the Intelligence of your BI community. Additionally you can develop or increase your skills for Linux as an Operating system, especially for Database Management Systems (DBMS). The open source DBMS can be used for smaller, non-mission critical data warehouses and data marts.

Finally, when using open source as a pilot for future replacement of existing systems, make sure to build your business case on 3 different scenarios:

1. replacing the front end reporting / dashborading / visualization tool,

2. replacing the DBMS, or

3. replacing the production operating system.

The first two of these are major shifts in technical capability and should be thoroughly tested. However, the final scenario is one that had gained significant maturity over the past few years and is quite common in large enterprises. Combine the three open source scenarios to satisfy small projects as pilot’s and prove out a money saving business case for your enterprise with little to no upfront investment.

Doing more with less is becoming a topic that no one can escape, as we progress further through these tough economic times we are being called to squeeze even more, becoming increasing efficient while creating value. The age old battle between efficiency and value has been a tough ying and yang relationship that usually cascades one way or the other but never equally at the same moment in time.

Business value has to be created, IT needs to be efficient, and organizations will respond tenaciously to each one of these concepts with your help. By applying any or all of the discussed items, you will see increasing value, with decreasing cost over time.

Contact:

George Haenisch

630-240-2130

@gchjr