A
Pipeline of Candidate BI Applications
Prioritized according to your
business objectives, application value, and development
feasibility
The BI Application Portfolio lists and describes the initial
“portfolio”, or pipeline of candidate applications
for business intelligence and data warehouse development.
The portfolio helps your company achieve three key goals
of a successful business intelligence program:
- Optimize data and tool sharing
across multiple user groups.
- Prioritize development according
to business goals, application benefits, and feasibility.
- Scope application delivery in
short, controlled projects for continuous added value.
By formalizing a prioritized list of BI applications for
a data warehouse, a company can be more rigorous about establishing
an incremental approach to requirements gathering, data
sourcing, resource assignment, and end-user delivery.
» Your Challenges
» The Problem
» The Baseline Approach
» Your Value
» Why Baseline
Your
Challenges
- Prioritization and funding processes
- Development resources overwhelmed
by user demand
- Responding to maintenance requests
while also introducing new BI functionality
- Reusing data across BI applications
and among business functions
- Endless project timelines
- Escalating development costs
- Work-around projects
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The
Problem
Balancing a steady stream of business
needs and limited IT resources
Read about data warehouse best practices and you’ll
quickly discover that smart companies design their business
intelligence and data warehousing (BI/DW) programs to serve
multiple business purposes and end-users.
Yet all too often, companies fall into the trap of the
“purpose built” data warehouse – one that
serves a specific need, such as performance dashboards or
target customer list generation. Or the data warehouse is
relegated to a “landing platform” for storing
data from different sources.
Either way, the data warehouse isn’t living up to
its business promise and full value potential. To get there,
you realize that you need to plan and manage a diverse pipeline
of BI/DW projects – a steady stream of new and changing
business needs.
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The
Baseline Approach
Delivering continuous value-added
capabilities in nine to twelve week intervals
The BI Application Portfolio adheres to two core principles
of Baseline’s success with BI/DW:
- Business drives requirements,
and
- Plan the long-term roadmap and
execute in short controlled projects.
Baseline uses end-user and IT interviews – or leverages
the results of a Business Discovery – to formulate
a set of discrete “applications” that represent
your company’s initial project set.
The portfolio usually consists of eight to twenty applications
that represent new data-enabled business capabilities and
optimize data and tool sharing across multiple user groups.
Each application is prioritized using a weighted schema
based on your company’s business objectives, application
value, and development feasibility – determined by
difficulty and dependencies.
Finally, each candidate application is scoped for delivery
in nine to twelve week intervals, ensuring that your BI/DW
program delivers a continuous stream of value-add capabilities.
BI Application Portfolio lays out a deliberate and well-crafted
set of business capabilities, invites discussion of important
functionality, and often justifies renewed funding or executive
sponsorship.
BI Application Portfolio
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Your Value
Business/IT consensus-building
and permanent approach to planning
BI Application Portfolio is a tried and proven critical
success factor for BI/DW. Your benefits are many:
- Prioritized applications used to build
out an integrated, shared data source and deliver measurable
value in short increments.
- A consensus-building technique across
both business and IT when it comes to BI planning, prioritization,
and budget approval.
- A plan which shows business how and
when its varying and complex requirements will be addressed.
- Development scoped and focused on
business value, while avoiding over-investment in IT tools
and infrastructure, or unusable data which doesn’t
reflect business operations.
- Joint business and IT accountability
for development outcomes.
- Time and cost savings for the BI/DW
development team. The deliberate and incremental “plan
of attack” informs staffing and training decisions,
development tool acquisition, and new organizational roles.
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Why Baseline
We introduced the methods to manage
BI programs by portfolio of applications
Many consulting companies begin BI/DW development after
first completing a set of high-level business requirements
for a single application. They turn directly to generating
physical data models to reflect source system data. After
seeing many data warehouses fail to live up to their promise,
Baseline pioneered the concept of the BI Application Portfolio.
Baseline’s thought leadership in this area generated
a best practice now considered a data warehousing industry
lexicon. It is adopted by clients and non-clients alike.
The BI Application Portfolio best practice has appeared
in various articles and books, most recently in Wayne Eckerson’s
acclaimed Performance Dashboards (John Wiley &
Sons, 2005).
With Baseline’s BI Application Portfolio, you have
a clear roadmap and a permanent approach to business intelligence
and data warehouse planning.
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