This page is an extract from BIDS BICC Solution authored by Kamlesh Mhashilkar-Head, Execution-MiH Services of Tata Consultancy Services
Organization Structure
Numerous deliveries and members in a BI Programme are administered by a strategic group where the primary focus is centralised service management. It is called BI Competency Center. This is a static group and should ideally be staffed with key decision makers for an enterprise. A team managing deliveries will work under this strategic team. This is the delivery team and can have multiple patterns, which are called Delivery Patterns.
Delivery Patterns can be devised based on requirements. A delivery pattern can be defined either specific to a technology or process or combination of both. One of the delivery patterns is depicted in diagram below. A few other examples are setting up an ETL Factory, Reporting Factory or a Data Mining Factory.
Support layer that consists of business users will pass on their business requirements to Business Analysts. Business analyst will do a high level analysis of these requirements with each subject matter expert doing a detailed analysis of the requirements to capture the correct business context. Business Analyst will liaise with Design Authority for transforming business requirements into a solution. After initial review of requirements, Design authority will pass on the requirements to Functional and Technical architects. Project architects along with Design Authority will scope the project and come up with functional and technical specifications to be passed on to development teams. Delivery Manager will do effort estimation and accordingly identify members for development and QA teams. Delivery Manager will also nominate a Project Lead for detailed work allocation. Project Lead does a thorough review of technical specifications passed on by Technical Architect and comes with a plan for no. of members. After unit testing, all the components will be passed to technical architect for SIT, results for which will be approved by Design Authority. This tested solution will be further tested by functional architect and business analyst to ensure its compliance with business requirements. Finally, the solution will be passed to ASG manager for production rollout and further maintenance and support.
A defined organization structure assists in managing and utilizing associates efficiently thus yielding better utilization and higher productivity.
Responsibilities of multiple roles involved in BICC are tabulated below:
Role |
Responsibilities |
BICC Director |
- Provides strategic and thought leadership
- Overall responsibility of BICC
- Budget management and cost benefit analysis
- Authorization of multiple delivery pattern
- Allocation/de-allocation of members to/from BICC
- Review and oversee delivery of BICC projects
- Define funding and recovery model for BICC projects
|
Planner |
- Cost - Budget analysis
- Budget allocation to different groups
|
Business Analysts |
- Create BI opportunities for covering business needs
- Nominate SMEs to analyze business needs
- Liaise the opportunity with Design Authority
|
Subject Matter Experts |
- Understand and analyze business needs
- Translate these into functional requirements (Business Requirements Specs)
- Co-ordinate with business users and functional analysts for capturing all functional requirements
|
Design Authority |
- Conceptualize enterprise-wide BI architecture
- Define standards and practices for processes, technologies and BI architecture
- Approve SIT results
- Manage CoE operations
- Manage reusable assets
|
Functional Architects |
- Define and scope projects
- Gather business requirements, analyze and document them (System Requirements Specifications)
- Define CDM or identify reusable concepts for a project
- Identify data profiling and cleansing requirements
- Identify metadata and master data management requirements
- Identify reporting requirements
- Communicate the requirements to Technical Analysts
- Validate that the solution meets business requirements
|
Technical Architects |
- Define overall technical architecture for a project
- Define LDM for a project
- Identify reusable components
- Define ETL load strategy
- Define data profiling and cleansing strategy
- Define metadata management strategy
- Analyze Load Window and impact of new loads on existing applications
- Define report generation, refresh and distribution strategies
- Ensure alignment to business requirements and BICC standards
- Generation of technical specifications in line with functional requirements (System Design Specifications and High Level Design)
- Review of Best Practices, Lessons Learnt
|
Delivery Manager |
- Oversee delivery of projects in terms of cost, schedule and number of associates
- Associate management and competency building
- Approval of deliverables
- Design Delivery Patterns
|
Project Lead |
- Co-ordination between Design and Technical groups
- Ensure adherence to Project Plan
- Ensure adherence to defined standards and practices
- Collate project lessons learnt and best practices
- Collect and monitor SLAs defined for BICC
|
Development Team |
- Low Level Design
- Unit Test cases and test plans
- Development of ETL and reporting components
- Peer review as per standards and checklists available with BICC
- Unit Testing
- Documentation of Best Practices, Lessons Learnt
|
QA Lead |
- Co-ordination between Technical groups and QA team
- Associate management
- Assure quality of deliverables
|
QA Team |
- Code Walkthrough and documents review
- System, Integration Testing
- Acceptance Testing
- QA for Services and Support
- Documentation of Best Practices, Lessons Learnt
|
ASG Manager |
- Co-ordination between Technical, QA and Support teams
- Associate management
- Planning of inclusion of new projects in support stack
- Collect and monitor Maintenance and Support SLAs
|
Support Team |
- Release, Versioning and Rollout
- Production Support
- Maintenance
- Administration of BI environment
|
Note- BIDS Solutions encompass the proprietary solutions from TCS covering Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing landscape.
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