The BI Pentagon of Success: Utilising Guidelines to Optimise BI

The BI Pentagon of Success aims to adapt to best industry practices, advising the BI consultant to use standard guidelines from its repository which have been time-tested to bring positive results. Such initiatives go a long way in making BI development and implementation an effective business endeavour. Within the BI Pentagon of Success, guidelines are a vital component; using guidelines across different components of a BI implementation leads to optimum success. This includes but is not limited to pushing for empirically proven data policies, data standards, and data strategies. When it comes to decision making regarding guidelines, there are numerous steps that need to be followed:

1.     To identify real stakeholders

2.     To identify dependable decision makers and duly clarifying accountabilities

3.     To frame, review and approve tracking policy

4.     To frame, review and approve, controlling standards

5.     To prepare blueprint for data strategies across the organisation

The benefits of guidelines are monumental and illustrate the importance of ensuring that guidelines are both created and adhered to. These include:

1.     Reduced project, technical and infrastructure costs

2.     Higher end-user acceptance

3.     Greater IT satisfaction

4.     Better use of BI

5.     Greater leverage with business partners

Guidelines: Best Practices

Business Intelligence tools have become increasingly sophisticated and flexible, thus are being implemented by growing numbers of enterprises across the board. High expectations often accompany a new BI implementation. The guidelines discussed below are fundamental for preparation and implementation to help get the desired results. Major business and IT transformations have enormously benefited from judiciously following these well-established guidelines.

1.     Start small

The management and governance of a BI implementation is an iterative process. It takes numerous steps to gradually move up the ladder of maturity. It is counselled to have a holistic view of the project, starting small. The ensures that the overall BI program is moving towards the desired direction at a reasonable pace without strategic objectives being compromised to any stage of implementation. Guidelines can help illustrate the best approaches to a BI implementation and starting small is also a good way to approach the construction of guidelines themselves.

2.     Get the sponsors On-board

Besides the funding of projects and technology tools, a BI implementation often seeks to invoke significant behavioural and cultural changes across an organisation. Strong backing and the blessing of top management are needed to achieve optimum outcomes. The BI Pentagon of Success proposes to spot and align all the project stakeholders and get the key decision makers on board as early as possible. This also helps to ensure that both the most effective guidelines are curated at the same time as ensuring that they are adhered to as much as possible.

3.     Recognise the Questions and Roadmap

One of the biggest blunders that a business application can commit is a failure to define success factors and a roadmap for the project. The BI Pentagon of Success stresses the importance of a better understanding of business requirements along with potential constraints and limitations. The aims should be understood as well as the steps that need to be taken in to reach end goals. A BI solution should be able to answer the questions it needed to at the start of an implementation and focus must never be lost on these vital requirements; the production of an implementation roadmap always proves to be a worthwhile effort in ensuring that business needs are met. It is key that guidelines lay out expectations when it comes to these issues.

4.     Align the subject matter experts 

As a best practice standard under the BI Pentagon of Success model, it is recommended to identify the subject matter experts from diverse lines of businesses who could yield tangible influence and carry a decisive power to bring about change. Primarily, a BI project rests on the handling and managing its data assets. The data steward role also comes to the fore, in terms of ensuring effective control and usage of data insights. Such subject experts should be involved in the creation of guidelines for their valuable input.

5.     Largely Measure

A measures plan should be put in place at the beginning of a BI project and ideally be driven by numbers / quantitative metrics for better understanding and control. The BI Pentagon of Success encourages the recording and comparison of key elements coming under the BI solution prerogative. The headway and comparability of a project’s tasks, activities, phases, benchmarks, defects, variances could form the core of guidelines.

6.     Train and encourage participation

One of the most challenging aspects of BI governance is the adequate participation across the board on an on-going basis. The collaborative nature of a BI program, however, depends heavily on levelled and prioritised commitment from people and functions. Providing BI training to power users helps minimise any productivity losses associated with the business transition. The BI Pentagon of Success focuses on quickly getting end users to up-skill to the level where routine tasks (in the changed environment) can be performed more effectively, efficiently and with the least dependence. The idea of a well-timed training or retraining plan always comes as a foremost guiding principle for any BI project and should become a vital component of guidelines created.

7.     Documentation

While ensuring compliance with a BI roadmap and guidelines, the importance of project documentation should not be ignored, especially the ETL procedures which ought to be clearly documented. It is also of immense utility to create a BI knowledge base of all the reported issues and the tried solutions (successful or otherwise). This can help influence and develop guidelines in the future.

8.     Choosing the right partner and tools

Knowledge partners for the implementation of BI solution ought to be shortlisted and finalised with due diligence. The business partner can presumably offer a one-stop solution with all the expertise to support the sensitive venture. Experts with past experiences in the domain could always shorten the implementation lines by rolling out the best practices at the right time. It is also equally important to close on the correct set of BI tools which have the right balance of data processing, dynamic reporting and excellent features on dash-boarding. Business partners can help construct guidelines more effectively due to their expert knowledge and experience.

9.     Build a business case

An effective BI program more often brings tremendous benefits to an organisation in the long run. Immediate benefits can sometimes remain non-visible so justification of a BI project can be a big challenge for sponsors. Highlighting the improvements envisaged in the decision-making realm could be brought to focus through giving supporting facts and figures. Improvements in revenues through better sales and customer satisfaction can also be showcased to prove this point. Reduction in costs could be another game-changing dimension that could validate the business case in favour of BI. By sticking to guidelines, it is more likely that relevant business case improvements will be met.

Application of BI Guidelines

There is always a dilemma when a strategic plan is made for rolling out BI standard guidelines as not all business rules are universally applicable across organisations. Even standard guidelines may get impacted over time due to regulatory changes, new industry practices, or management’s personal preferences.

The closer to the guidelines a BI system is enforced, the greater the probability of consistency and efficiency in performance and results. BI standardisation can bring considerable direct and indirect return on investment (ROI). Conversely, if benchmarks are ignored or only partial compliance is undertaken, the cost of re-work or correcting the path turn out to be detrimental for the endeavour.

Maninder Singh is a leader in Cloud Business Intelligence and Analytics with more than a decade of experience. He is the author of the Flagship Model: The BI Pentagon of Success. Many thanks to Hannah Jones and Harpreet Singh for their contributions to this article.

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