Business intelligence is a subset of the information management discipline which governs accountability for the structure and design, storage, movement, security, quality, delivery and usage of information required for management and business intelligence purposes.

What is business intelligence change?

Change is defined as anything—hardware, software, system components, services, documents, or processes—that is deliberately introduced into the production environment and which may affect a service level agreement (SLA) or otherwise affect the functioning of the environment or one of its components.

All changes falling under this definition should be governed by a change management policy as changes may:

• Affect multiple users;
• Potentially disrupt business-critical services;
• Involve hardware (such as servers or networking equipment) or software modifications;
• Affect data stored and hence the data management, data movement and data presentation environments; and
• Involve operational and process modifications that affect multiple users.

What is a change management policy?

Business intelligence change requires a policy and procedures, or process, to implement the policy. The policy should address:

• Purpose, lets everyone know what the policy covers;

• Effective date—specifies the date the policy started;

• Application lets everyone know who is expected to follow the policy;
  

• Background or context provides more information as to why the policy is needed. Depending on the organization this could discuss things like “risks addressed";

• Definitions provides clearer definitions for any terms and concepts found in policy;

• Related policies e.g.
  
• Business continuity;
• Disaster recovery; 
• Information security;
• Meta data management;
• Data quality metrics;
• Corporate metrics management;
• Database management; and
• project management
  

• Related standards and best practices e.g.
• Data model (structure and design);
• Database management (storage);
• Data movement;
• Security;
• Data quality;
  
• Business intelligence
• Data model (structure and design);
• Database management (storage);
• Data movement;
• Security;
• Data quality; and
• Business intelligence


• Policy objectives should lists specific objectives and expected results. In other words, what the company hopes to achieve with this policy;

• Policy statements e.g. All changes to the business intelligence production environment shall follow the procedures described in the change management methodology and change management process;

• Accountability should specify the specific responsibilities of people concerned with the policy e.g.
• Change initiator;
• Change manager;
• Change owner;
• Change management team;
• Release manager;
• Documentation coordinator;
• Communications coordinator;
• Change test coordinator; and
• Data architect, data movement designer and business intelligence designers

• Consequences should specify what will happen in the policy is not followed e.g. disciplinary actions for failure to adhere to the policy; and

• Review cycle specifies how frequently the policy will be reviewed e.g this policy shall be reviewed annually.
  

Summary...

Change is defined as anything—hardware, software, system components, services, documents, or processes—that is deliberately introduced into the production environment and which may affect a service level agreement (SLA) or otherwise affect the functioning of the environment or one of its components.

All changes falling under this definition should be governed by a change management policy, and implemented by a change management methodology and change management process.