Book Image

Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology

By : John Heaton
Book Image

Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology

By: John Heaton

Overview of this book

Oracle Database 11g is a comprehensive database platform for data warehousing and business intelligence that combines industry-leading scalability and performance, deeply-integrated analytics, and embedded integration and data-quality all in a single platform running on a reliable, low-cost grid infrastructure. This book steps through the lifecycle of building a data warehouse with key tips and techniques along the way. Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology outlines the key ways to effectively use Oracle technology to deliver your business intelligence solution. This is a practical guide starting with key recipes for project management then moving onto project delivery. Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology is a practical guide for performing key steps and functions on your project. This book starts with setting the foundation for a highly repeatable efficient project management approach by assessing your current methodology to see how suitable it is for a business intelligence program. We also learn to set up the project delivery phases to consistently estimate the effort for a project. Along the way we learn to create blueprints for the business intelligence solution that help to connect and map out the destination of the solution. We then move on to analyze requirements, sources, and data. Finally we learn to secure the data as it is an important asset within the organization and needs to be secured efficiently and effectively.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Business Intelligence Cookbook: A Project Lifecycle Approach Using Oracle Technology
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Mapping your business culture


The business culture of the organization will greatly influence the way in which you will structure and gather requirements for your BI Initiative. It is important to understand your business community so that you can tailor the communications and information to be effective and relevant. By asking a few simple questions, it is possible to determine the type of business community.

Getting ready

Before starting the exercise, you need to identify a few key resources to gather some information. The resources you will need to identify are as follows:

  • A C-Level or upper management executive sponsor of the BI Initiative

  • A line manager who will utilize the solution

  • An IT manager who will be responsible for maintaining the solution

How to do it...

To understand your business culture you will need to enhance the Readiness Assessment. The assessment will be enhanced by more open-ended questions which enable insight into the businesses growth strategy, and how the information is managed and consumed.

  1. 1. Open your Readiness Assessment Worksheet and add a new worksheet called Business Culture:

  2. 2. Create questions in the worksheet which focus on the way the organization has grown, the phase in which the organization is, information accessibility, tools availability, and so on. See the Readiness Assessment for more sample questions.

  3. 3. This time distribute the worksheet to a selective people within the organization at first to gain an understanding.

  4. 4. Collect responses to the questions and collate the information.

  5. 5. Set up follow-up meetings with the survey participants to review their answers.

How it works...

By understanding the business culture of your organization, you can approach BI Initiative effectively.

Review the information returned from the Readiness Assessment. Should your results indicate that your organization manages by using multiple reports from one or more systems, then you should focus on using the reports as a basis for your analysis. By following a bottom-up approach to analyze these reports, you can understand the key information required by the business. You can use the Report Register to identify and register all the different reports you uncover.

If however your organization has a good understanding of the metrics, they will be used to monitor the business processes across one or more systems by following a top-down approach to analyzing your requirements. With this approach, you need to understand the metrics used by the organization and how they identify and correct an issue. You can use the Metric Register to identify and register all the different metrics you uncover.

There's more...

By understanding your organization you will be more equipped to tailor your BI Initiative to your audience and organization's culture. Understanding the basics of the organization can facilitate more effective communication, and hopefully a greater adoption rate for the initiative. Now we'll look at some key examples of different organizational cultures and the insights they can provide.

Organizations that have grown through acquisition

In these organizations, there could be a lot of different business processes and systems storing for key information. If this is so, then there could be a master data management concern to the real source of information, for key business information. It is best to include additional time for data discovery within the project plan, as a real understanding is required to understand the different sources of information and the nuances based on the source system.

Note

Be aware of any standardization projects or system migration projects which may be active as these are a good source of information for the BI Initiative.

Expect to see an increase in systems and differences in business processes as the new organizations are folded into your organization. For your BI Initiative to consume information from these new sources, a flexible architecture and methodology will need to be developed and adopted. The BI Initiative can provide a vital role in this strategy, by having a standard integration model enabling the business to integrate new organizations quicker and more efficiently.

Organizations that have grown organically

This organization normally limits the number of systems and variations in business processes. These main systems, similar to an ERP system, are good sources of information for business processes and key information.

A standardization of business processes and consolidation of systems are the normal progression of an organization growing organically. Be aware of upgrade projects or a project that will replace existing systems; these will normally introduce enhancement for business processes and key functionality in core systems. Again, a flexible architecture and methodology are key to ensuring that the BI Initiative is capable of embracing this change.

Organizations and growth phases

For an organization in a growth phase, typically information requested will be to do with expansion metrics, sales, volumes, and so on. The focus of the organization will be external, and to the markets. This enables the BI Initiative to focus efforts on delivering information which can increase these metrics, or provide insight into increasing the revenue, market share, and so forth.

If the organization however is in a contraction phase, the metrics and focus are normally on cost reduction and containment. For this, the BI Initiative should focus effort on optimizing existing business processes, and look for ways to reduce cost. Finding relationships between metrics is essential in this phase of an organization. Thus, correlations between spend and efficiency are invaluable at this stage.

Metric driven organizations

These organizations normally use management by exception. They use metrics to identify problem areas, and then drill into the problem areas to understand issues. If your organization has adopted such practices, then they are an advanced organization and the BI Initiative should assist by automating and distributing these metrics. Organizations like these normally have a single version or very few variations of the same information, making it easier to find the trusted source of the information. BI Initiatives in these environments are normally very rare.

Report managed organizations

Organizations that manage by means of reports or details are normally very early in their BI Initiative. Organizations at this point require a gradual approach to adopting Business Intelligence. For these organizations, it is essential to invest a lot of time in education and communication around the BI Initiative, to outline the benefits and approach. It will be key to prove to business users that the BI Initiative can produce reports of equal or better quality, in a more efficient manner than the current manual processes. In an organization you will normally find multiple reports that represent the same information in a slightly different manner. This will be evident if you analyze a business process and gather all the reports and information used during the business process. Reducing the number of reports, gaining consensus, and providing automated information are paramount to success in these situations. BI Initiatives in these environments are normally very common.

Once this is done, taking the organization to the next step of common business metrics and enabling them to manage by exception is possible.

Understanding if a line manager has the necessary information, and the amount of effort needed to obtain this information, is a great way to determine whether the area of responsibility requires immediate attention. This helps set priorities for the BI Initiative.

Utilizing existing reports as a basis for requirements gathering helps the project to contain scope, and business users to understand the charter of the initiative. It is not recommended to ask a business user what they want as it is a very ambiguous question.

Identify the key information that is required to operationally manage a department, or report information to higher levels of management. Try and identify which systems provide key pieces of information. This helps not only to identify this information, but gives you insight into which systems the business determines as the source of record for the information.

Information is normally extracted from systems and then manually manipulated in spreadsheets. The spreadsheets inherently contain a lot of business rules in the form of the following:

  • Calculations

  • Data standardizations

  • Groupings

  • Filters

  • Key attributes

  • Visualization cues

It is important not only to look at the spreadsheets as example reports, but also to capture these business rules and standardize across the organization.

See also

For information about Blueprint, look at Chapter 5, The Blueprint. For more information about using this information, look at Chapter 2, Establishing the Project.