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Business Intelligence Best Practices
Improve effectiveness with David Bowman’s
information management guidelines for business intelligence best
practices
This
site is designed for Information
Technology professionals who need to improve effectiveness and
require guidance and direction to help teams consistently produce error
free results.
It provides information management guidelines for business intelligence
roles
and responsibilities and best practices.
What is Business Intelligence?
- Should focus on the tools and techniques used to
enable data analysis by
end-users; and
- Should provide
direction on business intelligence and analytics including business
intelligence best practices,
data analysis, end-user customizable reports, online analytic
processing and data mining
Roles
and Responsibilities
 Solution Architect
- Should have overall
responsibility for the entire data warehouse solution;
- Should provide technical/management
direction
to the data warehouse team to ensure the integrity of the data
warehouse; and
- Should have overall responsibility for
the quality of
all data architecture deliverables.
Business Intelligence Architect
- Should have overall responsibility for
the business intelligence solution and all deliverables;
- Should define business intelligence
reporting and analytic requirements as part of requirements
specification;
- Should provide technical direction to
assigned business intelligence developers; and
- Should be responsible to the solution
architect for
the quality of all business intelligence deliverables.
Business Intelligence Developer
- Should be accountable to the Business
Intelligence Architect for the detailed design and development of
business intelligence reporting and analytics components;
- Should create unit test plans;
- Should develop business intelligence
code;
- Should perform unit testing;
- Should document unit test results;
- Should compile business intelligence
object migration inventory; and
- Should respond to defects identified
during testing.
Business
intelligence Infrastructure
- Should support business intelligence solution design;
- Should support business analytic requirements;
- Should support business intelligence reporting;
- Should support decision support requirements;
- Should provide knowledge workers the capability of
direct access to detailed data using a
standardized tool suite;
- Should not require intervention by Information
Technology professionals;
- Should provide a semantic metadata layer to allow end
users to
have a business view of the data which is translated for access into
the underlying physical database structure by the tool;
- Should consider allowing power
users direct access to data using more advanced tools;
- Should implement security through a
combination of data and application level access controls.
- Should consider common business intelligence tools
such as Business Objects, from SAP, Cognos, from IBM, Enterprise Guide,
from SAS, MicroStrategy, Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise
Edition, from Oracle, SQL Server Analysis Services, from
Microsoft, and
WebFocus, from IBM;
- Should consider common data visualization and
discovery tools such as Visual Analytics, from SAS, Domo, QlikView,
from QlikTech, Spotfire, from TIBCO and Tableau;
and
- Should consider common data mining tools such as
Enterprise Miner, from SAS, KXEN, from SAP and SPSS, from IBM.
Business
Intelligence
- Should maintain a history of
changes and support slowly changing dimensions;
- Should provide a semantics layer,
shielding business users from having to understand technology and
IT-related terms;
- Should include usage-monitoring reports;
- Should be capable of logging usage data;
- Should identify data elements in demand versus
those that have become obsolete and can be removed;
- Should proactively manage performance impact
through usage governors;
- Should provide a full range of Business Intelligence
capabilities e.g. operational reporting, ad-hoc query reporting, OLAP,
data mining, corporate intranet portals, corporate performance
management scorecards, dashboards, etc;
- Should include analytic applications;
- Should define a data classification scheme, which
identifies different levels of data
sensitivity and the corresponding protective measures; and
- Should provide the capability, where appropriate, for
business user to “drill through” or “drill
across” the various physical and logical layers in the information.
Summary...
Information delivery should focus on the tools and techniques used to
enable data analysis by
end-users; and should provide
direction on business intelligence and analytics including business
intelligence best practices,
data analysis, end-user customizable reports, online analytic
processing and data mining.
This site provided information management guidelines for business
intelligence
roles
and responsibilities and best practices.
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