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This is the device that changed my life. Sinclair ZX Spectrum released in 1982 Here was a device that I had total control over and I learnt how to program. Basics, variables, boolean logic, loops

IT is about the Information NOT the technology all computers do is capture information, process it then spit it back out again in a usable format

1992 Windows 3.1 1992 Access 1 Relational database, entities & relationships,3NF indexes & SQL

RFID tags, GPS yield mapping, automated milking, least cost ration formulation Talk to real users Build prototypes

The only limits were my imagination. Building applications is a creative process

Keep things simple and going back to first principles Solving problems is easy you just have to ask the right questions! If your solution seems complicated you probably havent understood the problem! When you have truly mastered a subject or a problem the solution will be simple. When a business grows then complexity increases as often departmental managers want to build their own empire. It takes strong leadership and exceptional management to simplify things

Users are tuned into WIIFM whats in it for me

People are motivated to avoid a pain or make a gain. Generally avoiding a pain is an easier sell!

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Understand the business model and business processes that support this. Identify the information and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) required to monitor each process and the system(s) of record that will capture this. Focus on the business processes that give the business competitive advantage customising standard business processes, such as Accounts Payable or HR is rarely cost effective its usually simpler and more cost effective to change the business process to match the software and makes future upgrading easier and cheaper. The core business process is not always what you think, for example Amazon is an IT & logistics company; not a book seller!

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Typically 70% of the challenge of implementing a new system will be People (change management) so make sure you understand the requirements of the real end users. People should want to use your solution (as it saves them time and makes their life easier); not be forced into having to use it. Business Process is 20% - with a BI solution Information Governance is the key challenge Technology 10% - with cloud computing and improved communication making virtually unlimited computing power available on tap, technology is rarely a problem these days. People Business Requirements Who are the users? What is their reporting style? How will the access it (format paper v screen v mobile; push v pull) How will they interact with it? (Drill-down/drill through, pivot/customise design, analyse/manipulate) What information do they require? Sources (single source or combination of sources) Timeliness (EOD, real time, alerts)? Process Information/Data Governance

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Business Glossary & Metrics/KPI Register Master Data Management Data Quality Technology Solution Architecture Kimball v Inmon v PowerPivot Technology Platform Tool Comparison (summary spreadsheet) Gartner Magic Quadrant, Wisdom of Crowds Survey Implementation Current State Future State BI Roadmap Solution Planning Study/Prototyping Agile Methodology

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Data is a businesses most valuable asset. Used effectively it can help you manage your business better and unlike other assets that depreciate the more you use them, data becomes more valuable the more you use it. The challenge is how do you get the right information to the right people in a timely manner and a way that allows them to make full use of it to make better decisions.

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A traditional approach to BI involves building a vast data warehouse containing all of your business data. This a huge undertaking and becoming increasingly difficult to manage as data volumes increase, the variety of data sources increase and the velocity with which data is flowing into the business is increasing. In other areas of business many manufacturers and retailers are getting rid of warehouses for their raw materials and stock and taking an agile, just-in-time approach. Why not take this approach for reporting?

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When you start to build a data warehouse there are many unknowns. How easy is it to source the data do you know the source system schemas, whats data quality like, how consistent is data across systems, etc. These represent a huge risk to an enterprise data warehouse project. To make it worse, the devil is always in the detail and these issues often do not come to light until a project is well underway.

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The other challenge is getting user requirements: Only they know what they know Only they know what they need They dont even know what they want until they see what they dont! They dont know how to explain either of the above They dont understand your language at all whats easy, whats difficult Gartner report that typically between 50 and 70% of requirements change is the first year of operation. BI solutions & business requirements continually evolve. Source systems often change or users want to integrate external data, such as Australian Bureau of Statistics data, weather data, social media data feeds or industry benchmarking figures.

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If the business is reliant on the IT Department to manage and do all of this work it rapidly becomes a bottleneck. Often competitive advantage comes from having the information to make a decision NOW. Delays often mean that the opportunity is lost!

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Return on investment is largely influenced by user adoption rates. Two thirds of the challenge with implementing an IT solution are not technical, but user related. People dont like change, learning new tools or changing what they already do. The great thing about the Microsoft approach is that you are leveraging familiar tools, such as Excel that users know and love and just extending their capabilities. Training, which is often a hidden cost, is minimised and you get rapid adoption rates by the business, better penetration, and a faster ROI.

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The key to the Microsoft approach is that IT provides the foundation that delivers data to users. This data layer contains the data model, logic, business rules, calculations and measures to ensure that results are reliable and trustworthy. It is also used to implement security, so users can only access information that they are allowed to see. All of the Microsoft Tools can be used to build reports via this model: Report Builder for traditional formatted reports Excel & Power View for interactive and ad hoc reports and simple dashboards Performance Point for advanced dashboards It can also be used to combine data from multiple sources so provides an easy way of bringing in additional data that is not in the warehouse, such as demographic or industry benchmarking data.

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And the users build their own reports. This has been called various things: Self-Service BI

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Or Data Discovery Letting users play with the data often throws up valuable, non-obvious insights into their data and helps to answer the Why type questions. However, ever increasing data volumes demand the use of more visual tools for exploring, analysing and gaining insight.

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The final piece of the jigsaw is how do you share and discuss this information with your colleagues. Tools like SharePoint make it simple to share data and collaborate on it easier than ever before. It helps lead to the democratization of data. And whats more, the more users are exposed to the data the greater the ownership they take of it.

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A lot of the work that goes into a BI solution is below the surface. Reports, scorecards dashboards, etc are only the tip of the iceberg.

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Implementing a BI solution is an ongoing process and should be undertaken in an agile, iterative way. Project phases should ideally be less than 3 months.

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The old adage garbage in: garbage out has been around almost as long as computers have. Making business decisions based on inaccurate data may be worse than having no data at all and the impact of doing so may not just be financial there may be regulatory/legal implications.

Why do organisations require a data management framework ? 1. Do you measure the cost (including opportunity cost) of inconsistent, inaccurate or unreliable data? 2. Does executive management understand the impact of poor data on your organisation? 3. Have your enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, etc.) failed to deliver a single version of the truth? Data management is ultimately about risk management doing nothing is essentially gambling with the unknown.

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Whatever you choose as your BI solution Information/Data Governance plays an important role. The problem is that governance can be hard. Technology does not solve data quality issues; people do. Data needs to be owned by the business; not IT department and appropriate business processes need to be in place to manage that data. Attempting to implement a BI solution when data governance issues exist simply exposes this and can result in expensive delays or even project failure. Whilst some data quality/data management issues can be addressed, BI is not a silver bullet that can magically fix everything.

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Data Quality The state of completeness, validity, consistency, timeliness and accuracy that makes data appropriate for a specific use. Data quality is one of the key elements of data governance. Metrics enable the organisation to see progress towards targets. In combination with exception reporting, these metrics help business users to provide the right quality data to their customers, both internal and external. It applies to both master and transactional data. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_quality, February 2011
Data quality issues should be addressed at source and not in the warehouse ETL whenever possible. In that way operational reports built into LOB applications are accurate and will reconcile with data contained within the warehouse. By bringing your business users closer to their data they can see quality issues first-hand and are far more likely to implement business process changes to address these.

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Define which systems are the authoritative source of particular entity (golden record). Ensuring the ability to link data between systems

Master Data Management (MDM) In computing, master data management (MDM) comprises a set of processes and tools that consistently defines and manages the non-transactional data entities of an organization (which may include reference data). Master data management is a component of data quality in that the data used in the organisations business processes is cleansed, de-duplicated or combined to provide a single, accurate, complete record for a supplier, product or customer, for example. From an integration perspective, this particular variant is called operational master data management and can be achieved through a physical master data solution that acts a hub that supplies all other systems or a virtual solution that focuses on assigning ownership and management of the master data to a business function and master source or system of record.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Data_Management, February 2011

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Metadata Management Metadata is loosely defined as data about data. Metadata is traditionally found in the card catalogues of libraries. By describing the contents and context of data files, the quality of the original data/files is greatly increased. Metadata provides context and meaning and aids understanding of the data (or information). Included in metadata are the business metadata (business taxonomy or business glossary), technical metadata (physical implementation details), operational metadata (details of source and/or destination of the data or information) and document including BI reports - metadata (details associated with a document to enable searching and retrieval). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metadata, February 2011
Business Glossary & Metrics Register which define business terminology and definitions, business rules, calculations, etc. Whilst there are specialist tools available a document, spreadsheet or SharePoint list normally suffice.

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A successfully implemented data management framework provides the following benefits: Trust in the single source of truth; Data confidentiality and security; Compliance with industry standards and regulations; A framework for the identification, tracking and remediation of data quality issues; Increase the effectiveness and efficiency in the data management processes through technology enablement; and, Minimise the requirement of the time intensive manual data checking, validation and update processes. The primary benefit of data management is risk management.

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Reporting Style describes a users reporting and analysis intent: The users unique information needs and how the user wants to interact with, present, and share information. These styles are also defined by the organizations infrastructure and the skill sets of both business users and IT.

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Professional Reports are core to many organizations. They are characterized by highly formatted, pixel-perfect reports built to fulfil specific requirements. They are often automatically generated and distributed across the entire organization and may be delivered in multiple formats such as PDF, Excel, Microsoft Word, HTML, etc. They are frequently printed. Users are provided a guided navigation experience where a report may include parameterized filtering and sorting. Users can also drill down, drill through, and drill across to related reports. However, full ad-hoc interactivity is not available. SQL Server Reporting Services is the best fit for this style, because it handles all of the requirements and is the only tool that addresses automatic distribution of reports. Reports can be developed using either SQL Server Data Tools (SSDT) or Report Builder. Both tools are feature-compatible, but use different interface styles focussed towards their target audience: SSDT is aimed at developers and utilises the Microsoft Visual Studio shell; whereas Report Builder follows the Office-style ribbon interface as it is aimed at business users. Power users from the business community can create reports, but users may need to have experience with SQL, MDX, or other query languages, as well as technical report development skills to create more complex reports. When querying Line of Business Applications directly, knowledge of the source system data model/schema and business rules is required.

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Empowers users who dont have specialised skills to explore data and experiment with presenting information in a variety of ways. They can discover new insights, find persuasive ways to display data, and share their reports and presentations with colleagues without having to rely on IT or others. The best analysts, and often the best assets, in most organizations are those users who love to dig into the data and really understand why the business is performing the way it is. These users need to work independently of IT so that they can quickly analyse data from multiple perspectives by creating and manipulating a variety of tables, charts, and other data visualizations. After their analysis is complete, they want to share their findings in a report or include them in a presentation. Whether they are drilling into sales data to understand why a store in the Southeast is outperforming all the other stores or quickly creating a revenue forecast report for an executive presentation, these users are engaging in the Self-Service Reporting and Analysis style of BI. Power View is a browser-based tool that provides an intuitive and easy to use, drag & drop interface and presents data in an interactive and highly visual way. Reports can be easily shared and even incorporated into PowerPoint presentations

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Data mashups are created by combining data from multiple sources: a data warehouse, reports, spreadsheets, web sites, and so on. After the data is merged analysts will want to gain deeper insights by pivoting and drilling down into the information. These business users need to be able to work independently of IT because data mashups must often be performed quickly, or they may only be used for one-off analysis. PowerPivot/Excel is designed to allow anaylas

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Dashboard-style reports enable users to quickly & easily monitor the performance of their business. This style is catered to executive level or department leadership who require at-a-glance visibility on the health of the business, but it often also permits further investigation via interactivity. A dashboard often combines key performance indicators (KPIs) from various business functions on a single page to help provide an at-a-glance view of performance and the ability to drill down further when something is off track or performing extremely well. Reports are often deployed broadly to decision makers at various levels in the organization, from front-line workers, who need to make real-time operational decisions, to managers and executives, who need to make tactical and strategic decisions. A variety of tools can be used to create dashboard reports to support this style of reporting. SharePoint Server is a common thread across all of the tools and the recommended platform for delivering dashboards. PerformancePoint/Dashboard Builder is the tool best suited to building dashboards. However Visio can also be used to create very visual solutions

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Scorecarding describes a style of BI reporting in which users measure enterprisewide performance against organizational goals. Data is highly summarized and scored against predefined targets such as a balanced scorecard. This style is generally a part of a performance management or incentive program, though it can also be used to measure operational performance. A small number of KPIs are identified and monitored against articulated targets. The relative importance of KPIs is known and weighted to provide an overall score for an organization, department, or individuals performance. Business objectives and their related KPIs are presented hierarchically and can be filtered to help determine root causes of outliers.

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