A Business Intelligence implementation needs to cover, at a high level, eight or nine key areas.
The first is capturing business requirements.
Critical to the success of any Business Intelligence implementation, several meetings should be undertaken with the user community to determine the requirements of the business. This should involve all levels of staff – from junior analysts to board members. All will have differing requirements. These requirements are captured either in user workshops or one to one sessions.
Next is analysing user requirements
to determine a suitable Business Intelligence solution. Once all the user requirements are in, these need to be sorted and analysed to determine what solutions can be implemented to address their needs. You will often find that 80% of user requirements can be satisfied quite easily within the existing budget and timescales. The remaining 20% will normally involve considerable development effort or money, often both.
Once you know what your users want view demonstrations of Business Intelligence products.
There are many Business Intelligence products onthe market today. Based on what you need to deliver, you need to make time to determine what software can deliver the answer. This may require software from several software houses. Don’t fall into the trap of buying all your software from one software house. As much as they want you to do it, select the best products that will suit your needs, not theirs. After reviewing the various solutions available, make an informed choice as to what you are going to select.
At this stage you need to make sure you can build the right team. Based on what you have to deliver and the timescales, scale you team accordingly. You will need a team of developers, testers and project managers to help you with this task. You may also want to consider external consultants to help you with the implementation task.
Following on is the development of a prototype or proof of concept. This is a worthwhile step. It allows you to work with the product and deliver a quick win to users. Develop something useful that the users can give feedback on and use their comments going forward with the major rollout.
This leads to development of a full scale Business Intelligence solution. All hands on deck here as you begin to develop the Business Intelligence solution. Accuracy is the key here – accuracy in delivering requirements, accuracy in data quality, accuracy in delivering to expected timescales.
Test. Extensively. Nothing is worse that raising expectations, spending lots of money, investing lots of time, to then shoot yourself in the foot by poor or rushed testing. If possible test against similar data, or data from other sources. Test all functionality, drill downs, filters, prompts, scheduling, user access, server access, etc. It all matters.
And finally training. This can easily be done in batches, perhaps a few hours per session. Grant users access to the solution once they have completed training.
Feedback. Request feedback from users. This will be a continual process. More often than not they will be requesting more functionality, they will want to do more and more. There may also be issues with performance, or lack of functionality. Build this into a plan so that you can iron out any last minute issues.
A good Business Intelligence implementation should cover all of these areas as a minimum. They are the cornerstones of a successful BI project.