A Brief Analysis Of 100 Australian BI Projects

[Steve Bennett]

Yesterday I gave a talk at the Mastering Business Intelligence with SAP 2009 conference. The objective was to talk about the core reasons for 'doing' BI/IM/DWH and to identify best practises. I did this by looking at a bunch of projects that I have been involved with over the last several years. The key features of the projects are: Lessons from approximately 100 BI projects Projects were active in the period 2003 - 2009 Tools used: Analytic Tools: 50% in environments with SAP 30% SAS 20% with Cognos 20% Microsoft 20% Other Underlying databases: 60% Oracle DB 20% DB2 20% SQLServer/MySQL 10% Teradata 70% Australian, 30% Asian Mainly in Banking, Insurance and Leisure industries. The most common benefits of the projects were the development of the following capabilities: Better understand current performance (issues) Identify efficiency opportunities (insight) Reliably predict future performance Make better decisions because they are based on correct data and insight (trusted) Reduce risks (less surprises) Enhance agility (in handling new requirements) Promote a shared understanding (same language) Reduce internal conflicts (SSOT) Best practises observed were: Data Quality champions were active in both IT and BI Departments. Domain experts were drawn from across the enterprise Data owners existed for every data item and measure in the BI platform Data Council members are empowered to make decisions: 1. All business data and their definitions - including reference data; 2. Enterprise performance measures and their calculation basis; 3. solutions (business processes and IT); 4. Monthly meetings to solve DQ issues Finally, some of the lessons to be drawn are that to develop these capabilities you need to keep in mind: BI investments often spread over several years. It is not usual for stakeholders to fund projects for this period without seeing significant returns on their investments in the first 12 months. The actual solution(s) is usually only known when well into the BI project (once detailed business data requirements are agreed). 30 – 50% of your investment in BI will be spent on meeting additional requirements that were not included in your original business case. And perhaps most importantly: The more successful you are, the more new requirements you will have to meet - with the same original budget. I think that the talk went OK as I had a few questions from the floor but only the audience can give you honest feedback. If you are interested, here is a slideshow of the presentation: Download 20091020Presentation

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