Business Analysis for Business Intelligence

Bert Brijs

• Publisher: Auerbach Publications
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781466581159
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Computer Science
• Subtopic: Databases
• Index: Computer Science

Aligning business intelligence (BI) infrastructure with strategy processes not only improves your organization's ability to respond to change, but also adds significant value to your BI infrastructure and development investments. Until now, there has been a need for a comprehensive book on business analysis for BI that starts with a macro view and

1

Introduction

WHY THIS BOOK?

Books on management and information technology have a half-life of maximum six months. Fads and fashions follow each other in rapid waves and leave few impressions, just like real waves. So why bother? Why go through the trouble of spending more time to write a book than it will remain on the shelf in the bookstore?

Maybe it is because I hope to have unveiled a few universal truths about translating strategy into Business Intelligence (BI) architectures and certainly because I haven’t met with any course, book, or consultant who really pays in-depth attention to this crucial aspect of successful BI projects. Sure there are the obligatory checklists and the people going through the motions, but as soon as possible, discussions focus on data models, processing capacity, and tools. Even the more tenacious who try to push the business analysis issues to the limit often miss the point behind the questions as these are abstractions missing the organization’s context and its impact on strategy formulation and implementation.

Few business analysts demonstrate deep knowledge of the strategy process and its interaction with information management. There you have the value proposition of this book: to open up the potential of understanding this interaction.

ICT Has Grown Up

Information and communication technology (ICT) have reached a mature stage. The signs are clear: the majority of organizations no longer consider information technologists as the plumbers solving the problems created by the business. More and more organizations use ICT as a strategic asset, be it to support decision making or to generate surplus revenue, redefine market conditions, redefine processes and systems, or even redefine the rules of the game.

Here and there, an ICT professional makes it to the board of a non-ICT company. The demand for a methodical approach to translating strategy development and implementation into an appropriate Business Intelligence environment is growing. This book aims to contribute to this demand.

A Practical Approach

I am not a management scientist, first and foremost, because I don’t believe there is such a thing as management science as there is no distance between the research object and the researcher as in physics or other positive sciences. “Management scientists” often present their study results as cookbook recipes, tricks, algorithms, and control instruments. The few really scientific studies on strategy, organizational behavior, and the organizational aspects of information management often reinvent the wheel but their theories never make it to everyday practice because a humanist approach needs to add context to the theories during implementation.

Another reason for failure to translate theory into practice are first and foremost flaws in the theory that remain unchallenged as the “management scientist” is too busy promoting his theory and evangelizing the business community to deal with such trivialities as proving his theories work. I remember getting courses from a direct-marketing guru who himself had the most unsuccessful mail-order company in the business.

A last reason for failure lies in the fact that many theoretical constructs are developed for das Idealtyp in Max Weber’s definition as the combination of all features in optimal condition and therefore not suited for application in day-to-day management.

Hands-On Issues, Questions, and Methods

I do not bother the reader with impracticable theories. I prefer to share real experience about practices that work. They have proven their value in various sectors including banking and finance, industrial environments, logistics, and retail, among others. This book offers a framework for the practice of business analysts responsible for translating strategic management into information management strategies. It also provides senior managers with a better understanding of the strategic potential of information technology. And remember: it is you who has to interpret these practices and enrich them within the context of your organization.

Where appropriate, I address business analysis issues, not by providing the reader with extensive checklists but by suggesting questions that open a conversation. Business analysis for Business Intelligence is the art of well-structured conversations supported by deep and practical knowledge of the subject. Checklists ensure airplanes take off or your car maintenance is complete but they don’t lead to meaningful analytical exchange of information that business analysis for Business Intelligence needs.

In the Appendix of this book we do have a checklist-like questionnaire. But this serves only the purpose of preparing the interviewee. Thus, he gets the impression he controls the process as he can come prepared to the interview. World-class interviewers will leave the interviewee with this perception while extracting information she is not even aware she was going to share. Don’t forget, for some, business analysis interviews carry the message: “Lo and behold, change is coming!” This book can’t help you to penetrate the defensive barriers, tricks, and tactics your interviewees will use. I refer you to many good books on interview techniques to help you with that problem. Authors like Michael Porter (1980), Henry Mintzberg (1989), and Peter Senge (1990) have provided me with workable concepts and frameworks.

My approach to the strategy process offers an eclectic background of theories for those who want to acquire more knowledge of the subject. By no means has this background pretended to be complete or original. Some of the authors and articles were not the first to promote an idea or a theory. But they certainly were the most outspoken and marketed their ideas better than others. But I do also try to expand this theoretical background with authors from the non-English-speaking community whose work remains unknown for lack of translations.

Someone once said: “Consultants get paid for the answers; academics get paid for the questions.” Being a consultant I beg to differ and see the question–answer dilemma on the same level as the chicken–egg question. This book is my attempt as a nonacademic practitioner, being very busy delivering answers, to start up a dialogue with academics who have raised interesting questions on strategy and information management. This book doesn’t hold all the answers but I hope it asks all the right questions.

Figures Don’t Explain Everything

This is not your classical management handbook full of optimism. The more insights I find on why organizations are successful or fail, the more I am convinced that the old adage, “What you can measure, you can manage,” does not hold the complete truth any more in our Western organizations. There are transcendental immeasurable aspects about an organization’s performance. Henry Mintzberg tries to pigeonhole it in the ideology aspect, which partly holds truth. I have tried to map Western organization’s maturity on Abe Maslow’s old pyramid (Maslow, 1943) but that doesn’t explain everything either. But does this lack of explanatory power relieve us from the obligation to at least measure and manage as much as we can? Of course not. I hope this book can contribute to a more vivid and a more complete debate on the subject and I will be delighted to receive your comments on www.ba4bi.com.

WHAT I MEAN BY “BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE”

From Decision Support to Information Democracy

Let’s review a few definitions from my predecessors, Bill Inmon, Ralph Kimball, Séan Kelly, and others who laid out the foundations in the 1990s. It is amazing how most authors were still using terms from decades before: DSS (decision support systems) and M/EIS (management/executive information systems), which reveal the paradigm of centralized decision making, control, and strategy development of the various planning schools in the post-WWII era exactly at the time they were laying the foundations for performing Business Intelligence systems, propagating the intelligent enterprise! It resembles the classical technology development examples:

• Early cinema mimicking theater

• Early television mimicking cinema

• The first cars looking like a landau

A decision support system provides information to users allowing them to analyze a situation and make decisions, period. With “information” the pioneers meant “assembled and preformatted data for querying,” which implied a lot of “ex ante modeling.” In other words, the early DSS systems had an implicit view of the world by including certain data sources and leaving out others for various reasons: they didn’t see the value or they were unable to exploit less-structured data due to technological restrictions.

The latest and fancier version of this approach is performance management monitoring software where the organization models a strategy map with its (presumed) causal relationships and defines the critical success factors and the ensuing key performance indicators to support their world view.

So, Inmon and the other pioneers relied heavily on presenting summary reports for management with drill-down functionalities to allow the executive to look for further details down the path. This concept is still valuable today but it has been broadened and enriched, not just because of better technology, but because we have learned the hard way that this form of strategic information isn’t going to get us much farther in refining our strategy. (In some cases it only hastened the process of running companies to the brink of bankruptcy.) Yet, their assumptions about what management wants still make sense (Inmon, 1992, p. 163):

• Management’s attention is constantly shif...