GETTING STARTED - So you want to implement business analytics

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Getting Started with Business Intelligence and Performance Management

The following is our recommendations for a successful implementation which delivers the expected results in the expected budget to the optimal timeline. Whether that is increased revenue through better customer insights or reduced expenditure through process optimisation, the following key components have been derived from 10 years plus of implementing performance management and business intelligence solutions.

1. Executive Buy-In

The most critical success factor for BI or PM projects is executive buy in. It must be supported and promoted by the senior executives of your company. 

2. Repeat after me...

"Education is the progressive realization of our ignorance" - Albert Einstein.
Acknowledge that whatever you produce in the first iteration will be very different from where you get to further into the project. Once people see what they can do, then they start understanding what they would like to have/do and their wish list will exponentially grow.

3. Have a Vision, and scale to the immediately achievable

Its important to have a vision for where you want to take performance management for the enterprise but it is as important, to select a small number of immediately achievable wins (the "Low Hanging Fruit") to prove the solution capabilities and to enhance your ability to understand better the capabilities of your performance management tool of choice.

Examples of low-hanging fruit:

Performance Management

Annual Budgeting Rolling Forecast Weekly Target Updates Cyclic Planning, Eventuating, Comparative Analysis Loops Cashflow Forecasting Demand Planning / Materials Orders feedback loop

Insurance - Actuarial policy processing. Treasury - Funds transfer pricing. Finance - Business acquisition planning and modeling. Council - Project & Initiative Planning and projections. Property - Shopping center management, budgeting and planning.

Business Intelligence

Management Reporting Divisional Scorecards Mobile Reporting and Dashboards Implementing Self service analysis on a corporate data warehouse

As with all performance management solutions which are developed specifically for the customer it is completely dependant on how you operate which makes estimating the timeline for some projects a "How long is a piece of string?" type of project.

4. Develop a Prototype

Often metaphorically referred to as a "Tracer Bullet" the prototype is an increasingly adopted method for quick development of a concept solution which proves the concept and identifies potential roadblocks along the way.

"So what am I trading off by using tracer bullets versus "specifying the system to death"?

Pragmatic Programmers Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas talk with Bill Venners about the importance of getting feedback during development by firing tracer bullets and building prototypes.

Dave Thomas: 

The idea of tracer bullets comes obviously from gunnery artillery. [...] The software analog to firing heavy artillery by calculating everything up front is saying, "I'm going to specify everything up front, feed that to the coders, and hope what comes out the other end is close to my target." Instead, the tracer bullet analogy says, "Let's try and produce something really early on that we can actually give to the user to see how close we will be to the target. As time goes on, we can adjust our aim slightly by seeing where we are in relation to our user's target." You're looking at small iterations, skeleton code, which is non-functional, but enough of an application to show people how it's going to hang together.

Obviously in this case we aren't dealing with programmers, rather business analysts but the concept still applies. I would add to this that we recommend that your prototype is connected to the real data source, which will identify issues along the lines of 1) getting access to the data, 2) ensuring the data is in a usable format and 3) ensuring that the stakeholders of the source system are aware of the project and are ready to provide resources as needed for the solution development project.

Copywirte Dave Thomas.