Implementing Pragmatic Business Intelligence Standards

Transcription

1 Implementing Pragmatic Business Intelligence Standards

2 A U T H O R: Timo Elliott C ONTRIBUTORS: Roy Agostino, Mike Bendel, Cortney Claiborne, Davythe Dicocheea, Darren Cunningham, Peter Lorant, Pat Morrissey, Lance Walter

3 Section Introduction Heading IT budgets are tight. But IT is still spending in some areas. Business Intelligence (BI) is one of them. Why? Because BI projects: Leverage existing information investments Are relatively low cost and low risk Deliver proven high return on investment 1 Because of this, the BI market continues to show continued strong growth. 2 This in turn means that most large organizations are in the process of initiating new BI projects. However, few organizations today have a comprehensive enterprise BI strategy or clearly defined BI standards. Therefore they face a growing patchwork of disparate BI technologies. As projects continue to proliferate, the consequences are becoming increasingly visible: Rising redundant costs in deployment, maintenance, With many discrete tools and and training technologies and inconsistent Increased information inconsistencies approaches, Global 2000 enterprises struggle to drive a uniform BI strategy Frustrated end users who cannot get timely answers to throughout their enterprises. Many of their business questions these enterprises are forming BI competency centers to drive strategic Reducing the number of BI standards in your implementations and foster best organization can result in significant cost savings, greater practices. Often, this includes control over information, and better alignment with your consolidation and standardization business users. This all leads to increased competitive of tools. advantage by fully exploiting the benefits of enterprise BI. Client Issues for Business Intelligence, Howard Dresner, Gartner Inc,. October 2003 But implementing BI standards requires a pragmatic, phased approach that takes into account the organizational realities of large organizations, and the business value of existing BI applications. This paper gives an overview of the advantages of implementing BI standards, and takes a look at some of the real-life, best practice techniques used by industry leaders. Read on to learn how successful organizations have standardized on, and benefited from, business intelligence from Business Objects and why you should join them. 1 A typical business intelligence project has an average ROI of over 430%. IDC, The Financial Impact of Business Analytics, The BI market is estimated to reach $7.5 billion in IDC, Worldwide Information Access Tools and Analysis: ,July IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS 1

4 The Importance of BI Standardization Today s organizations struggle with wasteful duplication across different BI products, data inconsistencies, and frustrated end users. And the problem is getting worse each day as new uncoordinated BI projects sprout up across the organization. Most large organizations have already implemented IT standards for everything from databases and transaction automation systems to data integration and data warehouses. BI standardization is the next big opportunity for organizations to streamline costs and get a greater return on their information assets. Standardizing on business intelligence software will deliver similar economies of scale as other standardization efforts. But in addition, a cross-organization business intelligence infrastructure can provide exponential returns through better business insights that traverse your entire organization. Implementing standards allows organizations to focus their energies on how to better use BI and capture best practices, rather than focusing on redundant skill sets, integration points, and project requirement analyses. The results are new revenue opportunities, improved cost visibility, and better risk management. Lower Costs Reducing the number of supported BI tools in your organization results in: Lower software costs through more coordinated purchasing and contracts Lower support and administration costs Less time and money spent on BI evaluations Lower user training costs Faster return on investment for BI projects More Control and Fewer Data Inconsistencies Having fewer standard systems for accessing business information results in: More reliable data for decision makers Easier comparison of information across different departments, to get one view of the truth 2 IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS

5 THE IMPORTANCE OF BI STANDARDIZATION Easier sharing of consistent information between different user groups, and with customers, partners, and suppliers More coordinated security, which helps minimize unauthorized data access Better Alignment with Business Users BI is often an area of friction between IT (who provide information) and the business users (who need it to do their jobs). By allowing you to connect goals, metrics, and people across the enterprise, an enterprise BI standard helps organizations manage and optimize information flows like other business processes, leading to improved alignment, transparency, and performance. In particular, a standard interface for information access gives: More timely answers to users business questions Easier cross-data analysis to reveal new revenue opportunities Improved cost visibility Better risk management Increased competitive advantage by better exploitation of the benefits of enterprise BI For more detailed information about the benefits of BI standardization, please refer to the Business Objects white paper: Reducing Costs Through BI Standardization. IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS 3

6 The Practical Implementation of BI Standards Many organizations are already convinced of the benefits of standardization but are unsure how to turn that conviction into reality. After all, simply declaring a particular BI vendor as the standard, or signing a volume purchasing agreement, is unlikely to bring the benefits that you re looking for. Based on customer and analyst research, there are a number of recommended steps in order to introduce effective BI standards within your organization. Decide if You Are Ready for BI Standardization Successful implementation of BI standards depends on far more than just the technical aspects of the project. Here are some of the requirements, which can be grouped under the notion of the BI maturity of your organization: A track record of successful departmental BI implementations A minimum level of trust and respect between IT and the business units A history of other successful standardization efforts within the organization A prevailing culture of information sharing, rather than hoarding BI must be subjected to the same standardization processes used for other technologies widely deployed throughout the organization (e.g., productivity tools, workgroup databases, corporate databases, web servers, browsers). META Group, Business Intelligence Tools: Setting the Standard, 2001 A careful review of these factors may indicate steps that have to be taken before the standardization project should be launched. Aggregate Existing BI Deployment Changing the information culture of your organization may be an unrealistic goal in the short term. But there are a number of immediate and pragmatic steps that any IT organization can take to prevent increasing costs of BI fragmentation: Perform an audit of existing BI projects. The first step is to calculate the costs and benefits of each existing BI project. In the case of large organizations, with decentralized BI, your vendors may be a useful resource to help you find existing deployments around the globe. Build a case for standardization. Based on your research, you can then build a strong business case for BI standardization, in order to ensure adequate project resources. 4 IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS

7 THE PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF BI STANDARDS Develop unambiguous criteria. A key step is to define a standard set of non-overlapping tools for the BI needs of the organization. These criteria used to make the choices should be explicit, firmly grounded in the business needs of the organization, and agreed upon by the key users of BI. Start enforcing the standard.your choice of standards should be enforceable, using mechanisms such as formal project reviews or budget incentives. Build a Long-Term Business Intelligence Strategy To ensure that you receive the full benefit of BI, and to avoid the slow degeneration of your chosen standards, it is essential to have a long-term BI strategy: Build trust between IT and business users. BI stands at the intersection of business and IT. Often these teams have a history of mistrust that can prevent the successful implementation of any new BI strategy. Successful BI implementations often give birth to a BI competency center and, conversely, a good BI competency center helps ensure the success of a BI effort. Implement a BI competency center. A BI competency center is recommended in order to develop and share BI best practices throughout an organization. Ideally, a businessperson should head the center, and it should report to the core business departments in a collaborative environment with IT and the other departments. "Client Issues for Business Align BI initiatives around a framework. One of the tasks Intelligence," Howard Dresner, Gartner Inc,. October 2003 of the competency center is to take a step back from the existing BI deployments, and take a more global look at how BI should map to the technical, functional, organizational, and business needs of the organization. Implement a BI methodology. A formal BI implementation methodology ensures that BI projects bring the promised benefits. It should detail the roles of different groups (IT, business users, technical support, etc.), and cover both the technical and user-oriented phases of the project. Create an acquisition/deployment process. The competency center must be financed. Care should be taken so that it does so in a way that does not disincent business use of BI. IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS 5

8 THE PRACTICAL IMPLEMENTATION OF BI STANDARDS Sell the Strategy Poor or inadequate communications is the biggest cause of failure in implementing BI standards. This can be avoided with the following steps: Monitor and communicate the implementation plan. Organizations should constantly evangelize the benefits of BI and of having BI standards. Avoid common BI project challenges. Many project problems are predictable in advance, and can be instead be turned into communication opportunities. Conduct formal reviews. Organizations should audit the BI center on a regular basis to ensure that it has been able to maintain the trust of the business organization, and that the processes and methodologies put in place still meet the needs of the end users For more detailed information on how real-life organizations have implemented BI standards, please refer to the Business Objects white paper: Implementing BI Standards a Field Guide. 6 IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS

9 Standardization Case Study Background This case study concerns one of the world s leading telecom operators, with over 91 million customers in 220 countries on five continents. It has 190,000 employees and offers a full range of telecommunication services: local, international, and mobile telephony; internet and multimedia; data transport; and cable TV broadcasting. Over the last few years, the organization has used information systems as a major strategic weapon in the battle between telecommunications operators. One of their major initiatives was to reduce data inconsistency and share information more effectively across business areas by implementing corporate-wide standards for information management software. After an extensive evaluation, the selected software To win new customers and develop included BusinessObjects, for retrieving and analyzing loyalty, we now base our action on a data, Oracle Applications for finance, PeopleSoft CRM business intelligence process in which and Genesys for CRM, PeopleSoft HR for human BI plays the key role of retrieving and resources, WebMethods for enterprise application analyzing data in our corporate integration, and Documentum for document resources. Today, the company has management. 130,000 PCs, nearly half of which will soon be running BI software. The two most important factors that influenced the decision to choose Business Objects products were the Director of Operations, Customer high level of penetration within the company and high Relations Information Systems end user satisfaction. More than 140 BusinessObjectsbased projects were already up and running and most users in the company were already familiar with the software. The company selected Business Objects as its corporate BI standard and signed a corporate contract for 70,000 licenses to be deployed across all business areas: human resources, finance management, marketing, sales, and networks. Implementing a BI Competency Center Once the decision was made to standardize around a software package, the key to making that standardization successful lay in the quality of support that was given to both project managers and end users. A four-person BI competency center was created, responsible for overseeing business intelligence implementations. IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS 7

10 STANDARDIZATION CASE STUDY The competency center supports users and maintains the consistency of projects involving BI, and it ensures that each of the different teams share best practices. The team s tasks include consulting and development, support, negotiations and license management. As a result, the center gradually built up a complete BI knowledge base, detected the most common problems, and can now respond promptly by taking corrective action in the form of further training or calling on the BI vendors. Benefits and Lessons Learned Two key lessons were learned during the project: the need for pragmatism and strong communications. Pragmatically leveraging the existing 140 BI deployments implemented across the company, and the related high satisfaction rate, dramatically increased the chance of success of the BI standardization project. And strong communications were required to convince the business areas that the project We weren t going to force a standard was useful and represented an opportunity for them. solution if there was a compelling reason for not using it. Our BI choice The company now has a standard environment that matched a very genuine business need. covers all its BI needs. Having a global standard enabled The software penetration rate within savings on license fees, now accrued at the corporate level our company was already very high, rather than for each project. The choice of a single BI and so was the level of user satisfaction, framework enabled a substantial reduction in user so the choice was easy. training and support costs. Professional development became easier because the tools are the same for all Director of Decision Support business areas, and applications became easier to deploy, Information Systems upgrade, and maintain, saving time and money. 8 IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS

11 Choosing Business Objects as a Standard For over a decade, Business Objects has focused on the needs of organizations standardizing on enterprisewide business intelligence. Reasons to consider Business Objects as your BI standardization partner include: The Number One in the Industry Business Objects is the number one BI vendor, with over 24,000 customers, 17 million licenses worldwide, and over 400 OEM partners. Microsoft, SAP, and your other key enterprise software providers have chosen our products. More consultants, strategic integrators, and potential employees know our products better than any other vendor s. All of which means that our products will integrate better with your existing systems, at a lower cost. The Widest Set of Products and Data Access Business Objects has the widest set of products available in the market today, to cover all your: Functional needs: from operational reporting all the way to dynamic dashboards User needs: from the factory floor, to the financial analyst, to the executive suite Data needs: from transactional systems, to data warehouses, to real-time information feeds, and OLAP servers The Most Standardization Experience Business Objects has the most experience in helping organizations around the world implement BI standards, at companies such as Pfizer, GE Power Systems, Owens & Minor, France Telecom,Vodaphone, and Kraft. We have dedicated consulting teams that have helped organizations like yours successfully implement BI standards, working with you to get buy-in from the business units and avoid the typical challenges faced by BI projects. Your Installed User Base Throughout your organization, you probably have more licenses of our BI products than any other vendor s, and most of your existing operational and management reports and dashboards are probably in Business Objects formats. Which means you may be much closer to realizing the benefits of standardizing on our technology than you realize. IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS 9

12 Conclusion Reducing the number of standard BI tools in your organization can result in cost savings, more control over information, and better alignment with your business users and increased competitive advantage by fully exploiting the benefits of enterprise BI. Business Objects is well placed to be your partner in implementing BI standards. For More Information More detailed information is available about BI standardization: On the benefits of standardization.a white paper, Reducing Costs Through Business Intelligence Standardization, is available that covers in more detail the impact that BI fragmentation can have on your business, and the benefits of implementing business intelligence standards. The document specifically addresses the effects of disparate BI projects on business users, IT, and customers. On the practical implementation of BI standards.a white paper, Implementing Business Intelligence Standards a Field Guide is available that illustrates how organizations have successfully implemented BI standards. Topics covered include: How to perform a BI audit Segmenting user profiles Establishing unambiguous criteria for BI choices Staffing a BI competency center How to avoid common BI project challenges You can download both white papers from On Business Objects standardization products and services. Our sales and services staff can help you through the process of gathering the information you need to make a case for standardization within your organization. Detailed information about the Business Objects standardization products and services can be found on the world wide web: 10 IMPLEMENTING PRAGMATIC BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE STANDARDS

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16 Americas Tel: Australia Tel: Belgium Tel: Brazil Tel: Canada Tel: China PRC Tel: France Tel: Germany Tel: Hong Kong Tel: / India Tel: Italy Tel: Japan Tel: Korea Tel: /81 Mexico Tel: Netherlands Tel: Singapore Tel: Spain Tel: Sweden Tel: Switzerland Tel: United Kingdom Tel: Distributed in: Albania Argentina Austria Bahrain Bulgaria Cameroon Chile Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Czech Republic Denmark Ecuador Egypt Estonia Finland Gabon Greece Hungary Iceland Indonesia Israel Ivory Coast Kuwait Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Malaysia Malta Mauritius Morocco Netherlands Antilles New Zealand Nigeria Norway Oman Pakistan Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Puerto Rico Qatar Republic of Panama Romania Russia Saudi Arabia Senegal Slovak Republic Slovenia South Africa Taiwan Thailand Tunisia Turkey UAE Venezuela The Business Objects product and technology are protected by US patent numbers 5,555,403; 6,247,008; 6,578,027; 6,490,593; and 6,289,352. The Business Objects logo, the Business Objects tagline, BusinessObjects, BusinessObjects Broadcast Agent, BusinessQuery, Crystal Analysis, Crystal Analysis Holos, Crystal Applications, Crystal Enterprise, Crystal Info, Crystal Reports, Rapid Mart, and WebIntelligence are trademarks or registered trademarks of Business Objects SA in the United States and/or other countries. Various product and service names referenced herein may be trademarks of Business Objects SA. All other company, product, or brand names mentioned herein, may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Specifications subject to change without notice. Not responsible for errors or omissions. Copyright 2003 Business Objects SA. All rights reserved. PT# BP1017-A Printed in France and the United States November 2003.