Excerpt from the IBM Cognos Business Intelligence 10: The Official Guide

The IT Perspective of BI From an IT perspective, you must consider the costs associated with implementing and maintaining a host of different tools. It requires investment, time, and human capital, and such duplication results in significant inefficiencies. There is no sharing of resources or report objects, and a help desk is necessary for multiple tools and classes of users. Business users often rely on assistance from IT to find the answers to problems, make something easy to use, and solve problems. Users often want a big button that will get them what they want. So IT gets a new project, begins to evaluate tools, writes up the RFP, sends it out to vendors, and then, several months later, claims they have done what they were asked to do. The business users, meanwhile, have not adopted the solution and find themselves still using those disparate spreadsheets. The project is deemed successful by IT but deemed a failure by the business, because users still use the same manual processes and spend exorbitant amounts of time trying to solve the same problems that were present prior to ITs solution. How does this happen? Lets break it down a bit. We can recall countless experts who have made statements on the value of BI in the marketplace and how good data is required to make BI successful. The IT department has been tasked with participation in a BI solution because the mounds of data the company has collected needs organized in a manner that can be presented to the business. But is it really about IT and the technology it brings with it? The answer, at least in part, is yes. IT has been responsible in most global and small and medium business (SMB) markets for gathering operational data. It has built sophisticated systems that enable organizations to collect information about most aspects of their businesses, and weve evolved from legacy systems to sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to help our businesses make use of that data to increase knowledge and profitability. Because IT organizations are best equipped with resources that collect this data, IT has historically been viewed by the business as the group that owns the data. And because those who collect the data must be knowledgeable about the organization of that data, they have built and taken ownership of the systems that keep that data. Although significant talent and resources are necessary to make that happen, we now have a business unit whose business is data. But how do we know that the data IT is collecting can tell us what we need to know to improve our performance for tomorrow, or next quarter, or next year, or five years from now? More important, have we provided insight into how we collect that data so that it can be transformed into usable information by typically nontechnical business users? The challenge underlying this question is that IT often doesnt understand why the business cant understand the information IT made available. Because BI solutions bring use of information together with business performance, we need some sort of bridge that lets IT know that the information they are gathering for the business is accurate and provides the business with the confidence that the information can be used easily to make important decisions. And to use that information, IT must do the following:

 IT must provide good data. We have all heard the saying garbage in, garbage out, and this is very true in this case. IT must adhere to strict data planning and data management that provides, for example, a common definition of customer, and clean delivery of that definition as defined with the business. While at a client site recently, for example, we were charged with the deployment of a data warehouse for sales and market forecasting for a textiles company. When we pulled the data from its point of sale (POS) system, we noted multiple instances of customer names, misspelled customer names, and varying opinions about whose responsibility it would be to clean this up. Important to note here is that this client knew that multiple instances of a customer name existed in the system, but a manual process of correcting that in a spreadsheet versus in the data source masked the insight to the business that was needed to make informed decisions about product mix. IT must work with the business to understand the benefit of its role in the BI journey. This is not a we versus they undertaking. If you attack it that way, the project will fail. Dont take it personally if the business requires that you change a field or add a field in the database, or if your DBA is asked to adjust access rights to the data. Be prepared going in that youll need to clean up your data along the way, and make a solid plan to do so: it will benefit the organization as a wholeand, who knows, you might become an IT hero along the way. IT staff must educate themselves and ask for help from a trusted source who has embarked on this journey before. Our company has implemented the Cognos solution for 16 years, and when getting new resources up to speed, we have a saying: It is always easier the tenth time. That doesnt mean that it always takes us ten tries to get it right for a client; it simply means that we have found a few techniques along the way that are better than others, and our clients benefit by our having tested and tried functionality with the Cognos solution before we get there. The Business Perspective of BI Because we work with so many organizations, we have unique visibility into how information needs are actually addressed in organizations. The reality is that in many of the organizations we work with, finding answers to the three questions is a manual process that uses a mix of different tools and interfaces. Because of that, business users across the organization will pull together different versions of the same numbers. Different users will likely make slightly different assumptions, use different calculations, and perhaps even use different definitions for terms such as customer and revenue. They might use different interfaces, different time periods, and even different data sources. The result for the business users is sometimes disappointing, because they will sit down in a meeting and spend the most time talking about where the numbers came from as opposed to what to do with the numbers. This slows down the decision-making processes that drive performance. We have simplified this process by focusing on organizing the users into user groups and leveraging best practices when using multiple data sources. Imagine your organization and the cumbersome and timeconsuming efforts that are happening now to satisfy business users information requirements. You can appreciate the complex environment this creates for IT to support and optimize. That need for information cannot be dismissed. Business users are going about using their own means of organizing

data so that they can make the necessary adjustments to the business as needed. Perhaps inventory levels need adjusted from one facility to another due to a new clients requirements. Perhaps profitability is lagging with the largest client while revenues have increased. The answer to why these things are happening and how we adjust our business to accommodate them lies in a well-planned and well-delivered BA deployment. The Pursuit of Business Analytics Whether you are seeking a solution to uncover insights for specific industries (such as financial services, public sector, distribution, industrial, or communications) or to deliver insights for cross-industry solutions (such financial performance, customer relations, human capital, advanced case management, supply chain, or asset optimization), BA solutions and associated best practices will provide you with optimized decision-making within your business. The following discussion covers the progress and requirements that you should consider when committing your organization to a performance-based organization. Becoming a BA lead organization will move your organization from obstructed in its view to aware, or from a fragmented organization to an aligned organization. It changes organizations from rigid to agile, and, perhaps most important, it can remove the reactive tendencies that many of us live with day-to-day to enable a proactive approach to our performance. BA, and performance management before that, are strategic endeavors that demand support from senior management. Many performance management initiatives are led by the CEO and/or CFO. We have seen too many initiatives at some of our customer sites fall by the wayside or get lost in budget shuffles or turf wars due to a lack of commitment from the top. On the opposite end of that spectrum, we have had terrific success with companies that have truly changed the way they do business by leveraging the IBM solution to their strategic and competitive advantage with senior executives who were committed to fact-based and analytical decision-making. In one of our most successful clients, the CEO presented his information strategy, which included a BI initiative, and stated to his entire staff that you are either on this bus with me, or the door is that way. He attributes 20 percent bottom-line growth directly to the success of his BI initiative. To date, it has been an eight-year journey. In conclusion, you must recognize that your measurement of each deliverable is key in building the next segment of your BA journey. Your investment in strategy and planning are as important as the solution you select. To realize the full benefit of the Cognos BI V10.1 solution, start by considering initial smaller projects that will build a successful foundation for your enterprise deployment.