Establishing 'Making it Happen' as a 'Formal & Predictable' Discipline

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ENCYCLOPEDIA→ Enterprise Intelligence → - BI End-to-End → - Business Intelligence Performance Management →

BI Performance Management- Setting the Context

BI Performance Management includes various aspects like BI project management, BI information quality, platform quality, organizational impact, ease and extent of usage etc... This page sets the context, before you look at the details of individual performance aspects.

This chapter is dedicated to how you measure the success of your BI initiatives as well as operations. Business Intelligence is a big subject, and at any point of time you could be implementing/enhancing one or some pieces out of the entire BI program. For example, you could be just implementing an enterprise reporting tool, or a data mining tool or adding a new schema in your data-warehouse. A BI performance management goes beyond the data-warehouse and OLAP. It also includes the entire space starting from source systems providing the raw data, down to end-user applications sitting on top of a Data Warehouse+ OLAP combination (please refer BI architecture and scenarios). This chapter is important for the practitioners, users and sponsors to help them establish/track and assess the relevant metrics, success definition. The measures of success is not only limited to the IT or platform perspective. It includes the 360 degree aspects of the business, IT, people and Processes. For readers who are new or recent to the subjects of BI, we recommend you to go through the Bi end-to-end, Data-Warehouse and OLAP sections, to help you get the best out of this chapter.

A BI agenda covers the plumbing elements as well as the end user applications, which sit on top of these core components. Both plumbing and applications are bonded with each other for overall success. A failure on either layer would generally mean an overall failure.

The aspects around which the BI performance is measured

Project Management: This covers the adherence to the timelines, cost, scope, quality and processes. It is linked to the initiatives and not to the operational success. Given BI's importance, some initiatives will always be under progress at any point of time, either at the enterprise or at the functional level. You can refer BI project phases for details

Information quality: This aspect of BI performance deals with the accuracy of data and information in all components of BI architecture-ETL, Data Warehouse, OLAP and End-User tools. The fact is that, if Data-Warehouse has good data quality, chances are that all the down-stream components will also be good, unless there are wrong or inconsistent logics applied in the end-user tools.

Platform Quality: This talks about the overall platform quality, in terms or scalability, extensibility, flexibility etc...When we say platform, it includes all components (both core and end-user tools).

Usage and user satisfaction: The proof of the pudding is how much of it is eaten and how much is left on the table. The extent of usage of your BI platform is the ultimate manifestation of the success of your BI platform.

Organization Impacts: This is related to the achievement of the business objectives as envisaged. A good level of usage of your BI environment may support but does not guarantee the realization of BI benefits. The benefits are linked to enhanced organization performance, enhanced business results, better organization alignment etc...

Operational Quality: This aspect deals with the resource utilization, response time, and cost of operations, security, and administrative ease.

Modeling and Design: Modeling and Design is a stand-alone domain, for which BI performance needs to be assessed. This is one underlying performance factor, which forms the foundation of BI success. Unlike other performance aspects, this is more for review by BI practitioners, instead of end-users. Secondly, modeling and design is core to the performance of BI platform.

Who is the owner of the BI performance Management?

The 'head of information management' or the BI business owner (information management is larger domain than BI) is responsible to deliver BI performance. He establishes the BI performance management structure and reporting. He reviews & owns the BI performance scorecards and also presents them to the stakeholders. Refer BI organization structure for more details on this role.

Who are the audience of the BI performance scorecards?

Apart from the core team working on BI agenda, the audience of the BI scorecards is the management team at enterprise and functional level. Typically you would present the BI scorecard on the quarterly basis face-to-face and distribute it monthly.

What is the frequency of BI performance scorecards?

BI performance scorecards are having various aspects (as mentioned above). One can have a different frequency for different performance areas. However, to keep it simple, the maximum frequency is of one month, and minimum should be quarterly.

How does one generate a BI scorecard?

One can create separate sections within the scorecards, with each section related to the above-mentioned performance aspects. The process of BI scorecard generation will be same as any business scorecard. We recommend you to go through dashboards & scorecards chapter to understand more details on construction and best-practices.