Strategies for Supporting Advancement and Development Reporting for Advancement The Changing Economics of Business Intelligence The changing economics of business intelligence make this technology feasible for advancement organizations. www.supportingadvancement.com SupportingAdvancement.com. All rights reserved. Permission to use this information granted, provided that the SupportingAdvancement.com copyright notice and permission appears in all copies and use of information is for informational and non-commercial or personal use only and that no modification of the information is made.
What s On! Business Intelligence Defined... 3 How to Strengthen Advancement... 3 Changes in Business Intelligence Product Offerings... 5 Factors Driving the Need for BI... 6 Number of Transactions Requiring Analysis has Increased... 6 The Enterprise View is More Important for the Analysis of Relationships... 7 Lower Costs and Reduced Efforts Provide New Value... 7 Web Deployment Advantages... 8 Time to Market for Information Advantages... 10 Other Economics to Consider Before Investing in BI... 11 What Mix of Systems is required for a BI Infrastructure?... 11 Determining the Life Cycle of a BI Project... 12 Training and Expertise that You ll Need... 12 Change Management for a BI Project... 13 Starting the Project and Measuring and Managing Success... 14 More Information... 15 SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 2
Business Intelligence Defined Business intelligence (BI) can be loosely defined as the ability to use decision support tools to do real-time information analysis in order to provide mission critical information to the organization. How to Strengthen Advancement What are the elements that make advancement stronger? If we can measure and react to them, how will performance and flexibility be increased? How do these measures relate to the use of business intelligence technology? Historical and current data used to predict the future. Our success is now based to a substantial degree on our ability to predict. i.e. How much should we increase Annual Fund asks this year? Do we have enough prospects in the pipeline? Strategic review of key performance indicators presented in an easy to understand graphical format with drill down capabilities. Global to donor. Visibility of operations based on statistics and performance indicators. Success and failure both stand out more clearly. Real time analysis and availability of key performance indicators and analytics for all advancement data allows alignment to organizational goals. Adapt to market, environmental and internal changes in a shorter period of time. Competitive ability improved in vertical non-profit space. There has been a substantial increase in the number of non-profits in the last number of decades and some of the advantage higher education had for prospects and donors has been lost to cause based fundraising. Higher levels of accountability for program areas with accountability presented in a consistent format. No more meetings where everyone is trying to figure out whose numbers are more correct. Transitions between program areas more easily framed and reported upon. i.e. How many donors have transitioned from annual fund to major donors to planned giving over SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 3
the last 5 years? How many of these made an affinity purchase? How many responded to an e-solicitation? SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 4
Changes in Business Intelligence Product Offerings There have been changes in tools and database environments which make the use of business intelligence more feasible. Convergence of functionality between traditional report writing and business intelligence tools. Some of the new BI tools allow you to do the same Pixel Perfect report formatting that traditional tools have been able to do for many years. Ability of BI tools to do comprehensive and complex reporting. New tools allow joins between multiple heterogeneous data sources without having to know complex SQL statements and individual database vendor syntax. Improved BI deployment. Configurable by user over the web. Zero web footprint tools. No client software installs required. Controlled and secured. Web based development. Users and analysts who are familiar with conventional reporting environments understand browser and web based interfaces and can easily adapt and work with web based tools. Current BI tools integrate OLAP cubes, pivot tables and other analytical tools such as graphical presentation all in one tool set. Vendor convergence in product offerings is also taking place in the report tool market as they move their products to the web as the deployment arena for all reports. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 5
Factors Driving the Need for BI The number of transactions from an ever increasing number of sources facilitates the integrated approach of business intelligence products. The amalgamation of data using traditional reporting is more cumbersome. Economic changes and budget constraints. The initial investment in BI can easily be offset by savings in the short term. Globalization. Quick views and analysis of geo-demographic data. Competition. There are a larger number of non-profits competing for the same donors. BI investments can help you better leverage your most valuable assets to grow your donations. Your data. Connected enterprises. Membership and giving organizations may be separate with separate data but BI facilitates reporting from multiple sources and presenting the overall organizational view. Privacy and compliance. Cultural diversity. Multiple languages, multiple locations of donor and prospect pools. Internet. Driving business model. Number of Transactions Requiring Analysis has Increased SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 6
The Enterprise View is More Important for the Analysis of Relationships Lower Costs and Reduced Efforts Provide New Value Reduce workload of staff by providing systematically deployed key indicators in a format the doesn t require further manipulation. Reduction in time spent re-formatting information gives users more time for real analysis. Reduce information development costs by continually building on a robust foundation of information. Decrease the number of tools required for information manipulation and report development. (Real overall software license cost reduction.) SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 7
Web Deployment Advantages Less training required for all levels of staff. Distributed development, centralized control. Standard web technologies can grow apps easily. Cost of development no client installs of tools. Deployment of information needs to take place at all levels of the organization from annual fund to the Vice President s office. BI tools facilitate deployment at a very low common cost. i.e. The ability of BI tools to automatically schedule the deployment of information automatically at pre-scheduled times in a variety of formats such as PDF. BI environments can give the user direct control over scheduling their own reports and provide a custom delivery mechanism so they can get the information in the final format they require. This is a big advantage over requiring a central or departmental IT staff to do these on a one-off basis. BI also facilitates automated deployment of integrated/disintegrated data sets throughout the entire matrix of your organization without manual intervention. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 8
SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 9
Time to Market for Information Advantages With traditional reporting tools the process is usually to run a query, download data, manipulate further in a report writer or spreadsheet to format in a way that s acceptable to management and then present to management. With BI tools the emphasis is on up front development to build a foundation where data is extracted and reports updated and deployed automatically. Time to market decreases to the ability of management staff to view information on a web site and still further manipulate the information. BI automates extraction and deployment anytime, anyplace anywhere. Advancement operations in many large institutions are becoming more international with overseas events, and in many cases branch offices. Time to market for BI solutions vs. conventional reporting can be much faster since runtime and deployment times are greatly reduced. Save to PDF, printed to remote printers, deployed as html on a web site or any file type sent via email. Users can set up their own job schedules so they receive information according to the time frames they need it in. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 10
Other Economics to Consider Before Investing in BI Open source operating systems vs. vendor supplied operating system. Price vs. reliability vs. support considerations. User group and BI community support. Choice of hardware platform. Relation of hardware and software vendors. Totally independent or an integrated solution? Scalability of application out/up for the future. Degree of integration of BI systems. Choose one system to do everything if possible. Choice of database software and architecture of database. BI may require a separate database than the transaction capturing system. Multi-tiered development from DBMS to web. Can be more complex but most applications are moving in this direction anyway. Something you have to learn. Ability to separate extraction of data from formatting and presentation of data. Moore s law and other decreases in costs for IT items such as servers, disk storage, network access and other factors continues to decrease. All of these costs are decreasing in a greater proportion than the annual increase in the size of your database. DBMS systems continue to have new features that facilitate the extraction of information in increasingly more efficient manners. What Mix of Systems is required for a BI Infrastructure? Your advancement transactional database forms the basis of the BI infrastructure. Telemarketing, mass emailing program, events management, your advancement web presence and other systems once considered peripheral to your advancement system contain valuable statistics on advancement performance. These can now be considered part of your BI information set. A robust extract, transform and load tool (ETL). A data warehouse environment which is typically separate from your transaction recording systems. A reporting tool, which can deploy information via the web and also provide some users with the ability to create their own reports. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 11
Determining the Life Cycle of a BI Project What is the time frame for a BI project? Try to initially have a project with a short time frame. What tables need to be warehoused and which tables can be accessed from the transactional databases? This will affect the amount of time spent in development. What will be the storage and server costs and requirements for the BI project and how will your existing servers and hardware be grown? Remember that BI projects can use significantly more disk space than a transactional system. What are the performance considerations for the BI project and how will these change over time? Particularly important for web deployed information. Network and bandwidth access by your end users will increase. Training and Expertise that You ll Need ETL New way of thinking about data extraction. New mind set requires investment in training. Web deployment and report writing new way of thinking about the user experience. Training costs may be partially offset by less expensive deployment. Utilize and participate in user groups for your BI products. Establish a BI excellence site in partnership with your vendor. Do this to utilize their expertise at a low cost. Partner with other organizations or campus units utilizing the technology. These help level knowledge. ISP or other hosted solution to reduce initial costs until success can be demonstrated. Limits need to gain all of the required expertise at the onset of a project. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 12
Change Management for a BI Project Understand the inflection points of a BI project such as advancement performance and fulfilling constituent needs particularly in a large decentralized advancement environment. Market benefits to your senior management. You ll need to implement economically and organizationally viable technology within the project timeframe. Establish project priorities by determining what your most important information assets are and how to establish a seamless connection and structure between them so you can work with them easily. Senior management needs to be committed for a BI project and budget. Advancement may not be able to do this on their own and may have to look towards central campus IT departments or other partners. High impact projects should be the first ones tackled as these will provide very visible measures of success. Your analysts and report writers will need to be retrained, not only on the technical aspects of using new tools, but on the philosophy of BI and new ways of development and deployment. Critical success factors will be to reduce work, increase the flexibility of the organization and leverage all of your development efforts. Plan and build on a strong foundation. Do an impact analysis for your remote users and make sure you sell the project with them in mind. The psychology of change is not easy. The concepts of a data warehouse and an ETL (extract transform and load) tool may be difficult to understand. You ll need a lot of training to show how this will benefit both the organization as a whole in terms of information, but also how it can help to reduce work. Utilize your vendor for in-house presentations to demonstrate the concepts and strategy. Change is difficult when users don t have enough time to complete their current assignment. A BI project is initially a large incremental amount of work for staff. You ll need to provide additional resources which may not always be available. Acquisition of these resources will be critical for the success of the project. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 13
Starting the Project and Measuring and Managing Success Start with atomic projects. Make your first deliverable simple so if you have to crash and burn it won t destroy the viability of the whole project. Make sure the first projects delivered deploy crisp, clean and accurate information to establish the project credibility. Have 30, 60 and 90 day milestones and deliverables. Build your initial consumer base. Start with executives and key sponsors. The politics of success will service the project well, especially when success is demonstrated to higher organizational levels. Deploy over the web. Get the user community used to going there as their primary source of advancement information. Reduce the amount of reformatting in spreadsheets by providing 100% usable information whenever you deploy. Track usage of BI information. Monitor efforts expended on ad-hoc reporting and see how BI reduces ad-hoc reporting. It should continue to decrease over time if you are building on a well designed foundation. Continue to add base tables to your data warehouse when responding to all new requests. Market and advertise success whenever you create new information. In the future the demand side will continue to drive the use of BI and the development of new projects. The demand side will also ensure ongoing budget. Once you re in the soup you ll see that BI economics of leverage your information even more than you surmised at the beginning of the project. It s well worth the effort. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 14
More Information Supporting Advancement http://www.supportingadvancement.com Under the reporting and systems pages you ll find additional information on reporting, data warehouses, business intelligence and related links. The Balanced Scorecard Institute http://www.balancedscorecard.org/ An independent educational institute that provides training and guidance to assist government agencies and companies in applying best practices in balanced scorecard (BSC) and performance measurement for strategic management and transformation. The Data Warehouse Institute http://www.tdwi.org/index.aspx TDWI was formed to provide data warehousing professionals a single source of information to help them do their jobs more effectively and stay current with the rapidly developing industry in which they worked. Other Sources Check out the web sites of the major business intelligence vendors. They often have white papers, presentations, webinars and other valuable information to help you articulate and plan your business intelligence projects. Data Mining for Fund Raisers Peter B. Wylie Council for Advancement and Support of Education How to use simple statistics to find gold in your donor database [even if you hate statistics]. Good overview on data mining techniques. SupportingAdvancement.com Reporting for Advancement 15