PRACTICAL GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION

Transcription

1 PRACTICAL GUIDE TO IMPLEMENTING A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION To make business decisions every day, timeous and accurate information gives you an advantage.

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS Contents What is Business Intelligence? 1 Practical Guidelines for Implementing a BI Solution 3 How to Choose a Business Intelligence Partner 4 Where is my Company on the Business Intelligence Radar? 6 Company Example: DIY ONLINE 7 Company Example: XTRA STORES 8 Company Example: EXCLUSIVE INC. 9 Company Example: Quality Solutions 10 Terminology Explained: 11 There is a Business Intelligence Solution no matter how big or small 12 Business Intelligence from Karabina Software 15 Contact Information 16 Company Information 16

3 WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? What is Business Intelligence? Business Intelligence used to be thought of as the combination of technology and methodologies that were able to assist an organisation in consolidating their data. With information being a key asset in many organisations, the shift to data-driven decision making has transformed Business Intelligence from a static extraction tool for producing reports, into a dynamic tool an organisation can use to access, consolidate and transform their data into meaningful, detailed and digestible information that is no longer used by only business decision makers but by the larger organisation to optimise all areas of daily business. This agile approach in optimising, sharing, monitoring and managing the flow of data allows businesses to monitor their own progress on a weekly, daily and even hourly basis, allowing them to adjust their strategies on the spot to ensure their corporate targets can be met or maintained. The subject matter that appears in newsletters is virtually endless. You can include stories that focus on current technologies or innovations in your field. WHO NEEDS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? Every business decision maker, be it for daily operational or strategic decisions. It gives decision makers in all areas of the business the power to make informed decisions. Providing the business with advanced reporting and analytical analysis on company data will help to improve tactical and strategic management decisions. HOW DOES A BUSINESS BENEFIT FROM BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? With the huge competitive demand on companies nowadays to perform at 100% all the time, it is imperative to utilise all possible tools to ensure the business can operate competitively. This is one of the main motivational points that has driven a need for Business Intelligence for more effective use and delivery of information. Page 1

4 WHAT IS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? Benefits of a Business Intelligence solution include: Creating an overall view of business data to ensure faster, more informed decision making Improving data collection methods by enabling efficient data analysis, improving efficiency and productivity. Improving the time it takes a business to respond to an incident in a highly competitive environment, ensuring quick decision making can improve business performance in this regard. Business Intelligence solutions help to govern transparency in an organization Lastly a Business Intelligence tool and access to vital business information can help to empower employees with the information they need to improve their own productivity. WHY BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE? Business Intelligence has been around since the 1990 s. Most companies have adopted some form of Business Intelligence solution, either in a big or small capacity as a way to facilitate better decision making. Yet, never before has the demand for good quality, timeous and analytical information been so prominent. Why because business never sleeps, and the volume and complexity increases. Page 2

5 PRACTICAL GUIDELINES FOR IMPLEMENTING A BI SOLUTION Practical Guidelines for Implementing a BI Solution GUIDELINES 1. Define the goals for your project 2. Define the principles of the project 3. Evaluate and select the BI tools and supplier that you will use. 4. Align with IT, Management on the project 5. Choose the BI tools to suit your key objective. When deciding on a Business Intelligence project there are several elements you need to consider. There are an endless amount of suppliers, tools and types of technologies that you could get caught up in endlessly evaluating and planning without ever moving forward. As a long time supplier of Business intelligence solutions to our customers we have found that it is important to consider the following when getting started. Make sure that you are clear on what you want to accomplish with the BI Project or solution, ahead of time. If you want real time analytics and the solution provide you with a static report you can not going to achieve your goals. Decide on the principles of the project E.g. retain appliance/hardware and better leverage the primary data warehouse platform E.g. unify the company's data by establishing a new structure akin to an operational data store. Take part in the evaluation, selection, development and deployment of BI software. By first understanding your outcomes and evaluating tools based on the output they can provide you can better select a BI tool, Solution or Supplier. Involve representatives from the infrastructure management group in IT, the reporting and analytics team, the business unit involved in the BI evaluation and selection process and project Choose the BI tools to suit your key objective E.g. because of the software's ease of installation and the multitude of sites involved, the ease of use and lesser tool training required Page 3

6 HOW TO CHOOSE A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PARTNER How to Choose a Business Intelligence Partner Choosing a partner is a serious matter, and this needs to be done with caution! Is there a meeting of minds can the partner speak my language, and understand the business, the problem, and how to potentially solve this? A good track record has the partner done this before, or is the partner enabled to do a pilot on the solution if it is breaking new ground? Wisdom and knowledge can the partner offer advice on best practice, and not just sell a product? Engage in a proof of concept, with more than one vendor, to give them a fair chance to prove their skills. Be a good business partner and provide enough information and a dedicated subject matter expert to facilitate the process it is after all your business and deliverables you want to improve on. Consult the Gartner s magic quadrant; this objective market tool indicates which vendors or software tools currently operate in certain Business Intelligence areas. It gives an indication of the vendors who have the correct experience in the various fields. The magic quadrant will help you to start your evaluations process, allowing you to start with vendors who carry leading edge technologies and services as indicated on Gartner s Scale. Page 4

7 HOW TO CHOOSE A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE PARTNER TIP: ENSURE THERE IS BUSINESS ALIGNMENT Always ensure good alignment between business, IT and the vendor. When evaluating a solutions provider to implement your BI solution, ensure you engage with a partner who is willing to listen to your need, identify elements of the project you have not considered, are willing to demonstrate and build a proof of concept for your suggested solution. All too often a supplier will promise you that your objectives will be met, only to find out that the solution they implemented could not deliver on your requirements. Page 5

8 WHERE IS MY COMPANY ON THE BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE RADAR? Where is my Company on the Business Intelligence Radar? IS MY COMPANY IN NEED OF A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION? How does your company typically make decisions? Are company decisions based on qualified data or on manually generated reports? Is there a demand for more visibility into the day to day running of the business? If yes, then it is possible your company needs to explore what kind of Business Intelligence solution would best suit your requirements. CAN THE EXACT BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS BE DETERMINED? Are you under pressure to provide more reporting and better visualisation of the organisations data? Can you determine what kind of reports or analytics is required? Each business has a unique set of requirements, understanding exactly what the output of a project needs to be will help in determining exactly the type of business intelligence solution you need. You might need a prebuilt BI solution that is installed quickly and will demonstrate business value quickly, or you might need a more complex set of requirements which would mean you would utilize a consulting agency to undertake your BI project, as they will build you a custom system to suit your needs. HOW DO I ASSESS WHAT IS NEEDED TO IMPROVE BUSINESS? In order to operate in a competitive environment each business must define their goals to sustain their business. In order to ensure these goals are met, you need to assess which elements are important in your business. This way you can define what needs to be measured using your Business Intelligence tool. If the goal of the organisation is growth, then the system needs to have the ability to measure growth in the business in all aspects of its operation. Use the following company scenarios to identify with a set of problems and business situation. The defined Business Intelligence solutions outlined will help you to identify a solution that could help your company. Page 6

9 COMPANY EXAMPLE: DIY ONLINE Company Example: DIY ONLINE Company DIY ONLINE is a well-known online tool store operating globally with a wide range of products. To improve operations, DIY ONLINE uses several enterprise applications to collect data about e-commerce, customer relationship management, logistics and catalogue production. These applications store the information in multiple databases hosted across different servers. DIY ONLINE operates in a highly competitive market, and is always striving for better ways to reach more customers across new domains. The demands for various reports and statistics to capture pertinent Business Information, like consumer trends, sales and growth statistics, change in consumption patterns etc. The marketing team spends too much time searching for data, and preparing it for use instead of focusing on actually analysing the data. To facilitate this, the IT department has assisted with custom reports. However, all new requests must be processed through IT. But with an ever growing number of requests like these, IT spends too much time and resources servicing these requests while trying to secure and govern data access and use at the same time. Employees have even requested to incorporate social media data into their reports. There must be a better way to do this; therefore, DIY ONLINE is looking for a solution that can provide self-service Business Intelligence capabilities to its employees. POTENTIAL SOLUTION DIY ONLINE needs a more hands-on approach for their employees, who need to do their own reporting. There is a new generation of front-end tools available that specifically cater for users to do their own reporting and venture into analytics, without having much technical knowledge. These tools give employees freedom to access up-todate information when they need it. The tools are Excel-like, and therefore, using an interface that is user friendly and easily adopted. Page 7

10 COMPANY EXAMPLE: XTRA STORES Company Example: XTRA STORES With an ever-growing size of data, fetching the results using existing technology is taking longer and longer. XTRA STORES employees are often interested in merging their corporate data with data from several new sources and huge volumes of data now available, in order to produce more dynamic insights about the changing trends. Another request of data that XTRA STORES employees were interested in, is running intricate analysis against all the data. They want to analyse all of their information for a new level of insight that will help better retain customers and improve profitability, to quickly get insights and act on opportunities. Why? There are more types, shapes and sizes of data available than ever before. Where does it come from? Transactional growth in your business. New data sources image files, sensors driven Moving business online entirely new channels, with a different pace at which the business needs to operate, and an entirely new scale and scope of the kinds of data we are trying to gain insights from The way XTRA STORES users are consuming and collaborating on data, means they need a new strategy to handle data. XTRA STORES realise they are in the game for Big Data and supporting technologies. Now they need to find the best solution or approach POTENTIAL SOLUTION There is a new buzz of excitement in the technology community around using big data methodologies in companies that produce so much data that is was once just noise. Handling big volumes of data, and integrating diverse sources that leads to huge data, is not a problem anymore. The technology and methods are now available for those companies who want to be on the forefront of success. This allows organisations to gain better visualisation of their data, uncovering trends and new opportunities. The boom in social media data has seen a growing demand for a company to utilise and analyse this data - these technologies now allow companies to embrace this trend. The answer is parallel data warehousing big data! Page 8

11 COMPANY EXAMPLE: EXCLUSIVE INC. Company Example: EXCLUSIVE INC. Business Intelligence has always been part of the company s strategy and the capability to deliver one view of their day to day business operations. EXCLUSIVE INC. is growing steadily, and needs to revisit their IT capabilities, business demands, whilst staying in line with their strategic thinking. They adopted business intelligence long ago, built an enterprise data warehouse, and chose mostly enterprise-wide licensing options for front-end tools. There are custom written reports. For meeting these requirements, EXCLUSIVE INC. will go through the formal process of doing a proof of concept with multiple vendors, to choose a partner wisely to enhance the warehouse and business intelligence suite, to cater for growing needs. POTENTIAL SOLUTION In the case of EXCLUSIVE INC., there is a systematic and strategic approach to enhance the solid data warehouse and business intelligent platform in existence. As the development evolves slowly - with certain customisation, the same approach can be extended. Alternatively, an analysis phase with assistance from a partner, can assist in identifying the pain point, and assess whether it qualifies for further custom development or not. Depending on the requirements, enhancement could mean adding new generation front-end tools with better graphic facilities, or adding a set of data from the business not previously required in the reporting. The tools are Excel-like, and therefor much more userfriendly. Page 9

12 COMPANY EXAMPLE: QUALITY SOLUTIONS Company Example: Quality Solutions POTENTIAL SOLUTION QUALITY SOLUTIONS advantage is that that they have already acknowledged that their data is in need of a quality review. For this purpose, there are methods and accompanying software available to assist in this process. The whole exercise will be very valuable in order to understand which part of the most-used data is falling short of expectation, why, and where in the transactional process it happens. QUALITY SOLUTIONS suffer from regular flaws in their reporting. The managers don t trust the numbers presented, and often debate in SteerCo meetings. A few have actually started collecting their own information, and are not using standard reports anymore. There is always an issue with data, or a delay, and the meetings are not concluded as per schedule. Most managers and executives who used to use a number of standard reports with specific information have now opted to appoint people to do exclusive reporting on their behalf. Even though this was meant to address the problem, it has now become counterproductive, especially in decision meetings, where not everyone is reporting from the same platform. At the last meeting, one of the Executives made the bold statement that: The systems could just as well not be there, because the quality of the data is useless. The CIO has opted to investigate and suggest a way forward. He has recently read an article on the value of Data Quality, and needs to investigate whether it is time to invest in that thinking. This will facilitate the next step to continually invest in a data quality approach. Starting to manage the master data will prevent this from happening as this will correct the problem at its source. To make business decisions every day, timeous, and accurate information gives you an advantage. Page 10

13 TERMINOLOGY EXPLAINED: Terminology Explained: Each of the companies mentioned has a task at hand: to assess and understand their situation, and then find a suitable solution. The first step will be to do market research on options available. In doing so, each one will come across terminology used, which may be new and require better understanding. BI Business Intelligence The collective term for changing raw data in to valueadding information MDM Master Data Management Have a full process in place to assist in controlling and keeping key data clean and up-to-date DQS Data Quality Services Assist in identifying problem areas in the quality of the data Big Data Huge volumes of Data or Multiple Sources of Data Transactional growth in your business. New data sources image files, sensors driven Moving business online entirely new channels, with different paces at which the business needs to operate. An entirely new scale and scope of the kinds of data we are trying to gain insights from PDW Parallel Data Warehousing Specific technology to address the Big Data Problem DIY Do It Yourself Mostly Excel-based reporting done by an individual Power Tools Business Analytics New products that are purposedriven to assist in analytical reporting Pre-packaged solutions The products offer a self-help option as well as more rapid ways of producing analytical reporting The solutions are based on a known Enterprise system and provide analytics that are commonly needed, but aren t provided with standard reporting Page 11

14 THERE IS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION NO MATTER HOW BIG OR SMALL YOUR BUSINESS IS. There is a Business Intelligence Solution no matter how big or small your business is. IT-CENTRIC BI PLATFORMS IT-Centric BI platforms are never really fully embraced by the business analyst masses, primarily because they are perceived by most as being too difficult to use. They have a heavy reliance on IT & Knowledge workers to produce reports Only about 30 percent of potential BI users have adopted their company's standard BI tools, according to Gartner. These solutions are often expensive and takes long time to deploy These types of BI solutions are best suited for Enterprise Organisations BIG DATA BI PLATFORMS For large organisations that produce massive amounts of data through multiple sources, traditional systems were not able to process this large amount of data. With the technology advancements in big data analytics these vast pools of data can now be examine, uncovering patterns and giving these organisations a competitive advantage. Suitable for organisations that have increasingly large and complex data that challenges traditional database systems. These systems are suitable for large amounts of transactional data, web server logs, internet click data, social media activity, mobile call data and many other sources that are available. The unstructured data sources used for big data analytics may not fit in traditional data warehouses, as these traditional systems are not able to handle the processing demands posed by big data. DATA Discovery Applications Data discovery tools enable discovery "on the go," letting users explore data and discover insight without having formed a specific question. BI applications tend to follow a stricter methodology, with structured paths for exploring the data and following well-defined rules. Data discovery tools are extremely user-oriented, while traditional BI tools take a corporate approach and so are somewhat more challenging technically to learn and apply. This user friendly approach means that the end user can define what information they want to explore Suitable for SMB Market that is looking for improved Data Visualization (often to complement existing BI environment) Page 12

15 THERE IS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION NO MATTER HOW BIG OR SMALL YOUR BUSINESS IS. Will data discovery applications replace corporate BI platforms? Maybe. For now, some organizations (especially large ones) rely on full-fledged traditional BI applications to cover all their BI needs, but data discovery tools are gaining presence in the small to medium business (SMB) market. They are often used as a solution by lines of business and can be an extremely useful complement to traditional platforms used in large corporations. PACKAGED ANALYTICS APPLICATIONS In order to make business intelligence available to all organisations no matter how large or small, many technology houses have packaged their business insight tools in order to make business intelligence more accessible. The tools package domain expertise and are built for purpose to enable self-service of BI. The self-service nature of the tools allows many different users to gain value out of these tools. Short project delivery cycles, with rapid time-to-value Uses Enterprise BI best practice principals, but is available immediately without the cost and duration of implementing an enterprise level solution. Packaged Analytics Applications expand the use of information far beyond traditional power users to wider range of users. Now business users can access valuable information in order to do their jobs better. These tools are suitable for the SMB Market that is looking to start with a persuasive BI system with existing models and is looking for rapid time-to-value TRADITIONAL REPORTING TOOLS Traditional reporting tools can best be explained by thinking of them as a subset to BI reporting. Although all f the above mentioned BI tools are all reporting tools, not all reporting tools are necessary BI tools. With traditional reporting the Business units / users would define the report, these would be compiled I(coded) and maintained by the IT team. These reports are generated and deployed into the BI system. These can also include the standard system generated reports that are often included in a BI solution. Canned or structured reports produced by standard reporting tools can offer much insight provided they are built well. But business intelligence enables diverse handling of data; this is the biggest advantage that a BI tool offers over traditional reporting tools. In addition, BI tools are very user friendly and thus appeal to a larger user base, unlike reporting tools, which require expert help. However, if a BI tool is not properly configured or used it can cause more damage than an ordinary reporting to Reporting tools do not have the capability to provide the visualization that is possible with dashboards. At best, reporting tools can provide certain charts and graphs, but they lack the interactive capability which a dashboard can provide. In that sense, for executive reporting, dashboards and business intelligence tools are better suited than reporting tools. Often packaged with your underlying ERP, as a BI tool Page 13

16 THERE IS A BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION NO MATTER HOW BIG OR SMALL YOUR BUSINESS IS. Suitable for SME Market where information is not being used to Drive decision making Traditional Data Warehouse Traditional BI development MDM DQS Specific / Custom Reporting Requirement Better Quality Data Control Key Data Quick reporting and Analytics Huge data volumes and Complexity DIY Power Tools Business Analytics Big Data PDW Page 14

17 BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE FROM KARABINA SOFTWARE Business Intelligence from Karabina Software Karabina Software has established a solid track record for the delivery of quality Business Intelligence initiatives and is recognised as one of the industry leaders in Africa. We provide the full spectrum of core foundational services from Data Warehouse, Master Data Management and Data Quality Audits to the Analytical capabilities such as reports and the dashboards required to interpret data. In addition, we offer specific, applied and agile BI solutions which cover a range of different ERP and Line of Business systems. Page 15

18 CONTACT INFORMATION Contact Information Contact one of our Karabina Software Experts for assistance in your determining the requirements of your project. HEATH TURNER DIRECTOR KARABINA SOFTWARE MIKE STEYN REGIONAL MANAGER JONATHAN MATUS REGIONAL MANAGER: REPORTING & ANALYTICS Tel Skype heath.turner01 Tel Skype mikesteynkarabina Tel Skype jonathanmatus1 Company Information Karabina Software Pty Ltd Design Quarter, Leslie Rd East, Fourways, Johannesburg Tel Page 16