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Most BI programs do not begin with a mighty leap, but rather a series of staggers. It starts with someone’s need for a sales report to a financial scorecard and then back to a revenue report. So evolves the collection of analytics, dashboards, advanced models, and reporting that loosely forms our BI capabilities.
The problem with this approach is that there is no clear roadmap for ongoing BI delivery, and often the squeaky wheel business users get the most grease. Development teams become overwhelmed with maintenance requests, and users from across different lines of business aren’t sure how to engage IT to request new features. Unsure of timelines and resource availability, these users often launch their own "shadow BI" efforts to ensure control and timely delivery. Of course, this further exacerbates the data silo and ownership issues that are already plaguing your company.
There is a better way, of course. In 1997, Baseline Consulting delivered the first of what has come to be known as the BI Application Portfolio, or BI Portfolio™ for short. The BI Portfolio is a collection of reporting and analytics capabilities deployed to the business over time. It lists, describes, and circumscribes the boundaries of your enterprise BI program—and can be delivered in conjunction with our BI Program Planning or Center of Excellence Design services—to ensure that business intelligence transcends isolated projects and is considered a bona fide business program with its own development pipeline and roadmap.
In delivering a BI Portfolio engagement, we leverage a variety of input sources in order to distill discrete "candidate applications" from across lines of business and stakeholder communities. We then apply a series of weighted metrics, gleaned from our interviews and our extensive work in BI best practices, resulting in a prioritized pipeline for ongoing BI development and a relative timeline for delivery.
The BI Portfolio also identifies key data sources for each application and cites quotes and requirements from end-user constituencies to describe the need for new BI capabilities. Your new BI Portfolio will not only address a lot of questions, it will establish a common vocabulary around enterprise BI. And doesn’t everyone need that?
Most BI programs do not begin with a mighty leap, but rather a series of staggers. It starts with someone’s need for a sales report to a financial scorecard and then back to a revenue report. So evolves the collection of analytics, dashboards, advanced models, and reporting that loosely forms our BI capabilities.
The problem with this approach is that there is no clear roadmap for ongoing BI delivery, and often the squeaky wheel business users get the most grease. Development teams become overwhelmed with maintenance requests, and users from across different lines of business aren’t sure how to engage IT to request new features. Unsure of timelines and resource availability, these users often launch their own "shadow BI" efforts to ensure control and timely delivery. Of course, this further exacerbates the data silo and ownership issues that are already plaguing your company.
There is a better way, of course. In 1997, Baseline Consulting delivered the first of what has come to be known as the BI Application Portfolio, or BI Portfolio™ for short. The BI Portfolio is a collection of reporting and analytics capabilities deployed to the business over time. It lists, describes, and circumscribes the boundaries of your enterprise BI program—and can be delivered in conjunction with our BI Program Planning or Center of Excellence Design services—to ensure that business intelligence transcends isolated projects and is considered a bona fide business program with its own development pipeline and roadmap.
The BI Portfolio also identifies key data sources for each application and cites quotes and requirements from end-user constituencies to describe the need for new BI capabilities. Your new BI Portfolio will not only address a lot of questions, it will establish a common vocabulary around enterprise BI. And doesn’t everyone need that?
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