BI from the trenches… The trusted advisor.

I just read an interesting article last week that highlighted the importance of a topic that I have not seen any comments on before.  The following article http://tinyurl.com/5u59934 highlights a growing lack of faith from CFO’s in their CIO counterparts.

Why is this relevant to a BI blog?  It highlights the importance of several related concepts:

• How a BI practice can become the trusted advisor to an organization, thus supporting the CIO to deliver what the CFO (or business) is asking for.  Which hinges on:
• How a BI practice is thought of by its clients.  I.e. are they only tactical implementers or do they understand my strategic needs as well?  Which is supported by:
• How a BI practice is structured and what disciplines are considered valuable.

It’s this third point that I want to expand on in this post.  Building a successful BI practice is more than just hiring great technical implementers.  By definition, a BI practice deals heavily with business sponsors because BI projects are more financially focused.  Additionally, a BI program will not be successful long-term if topics such as strategy and governance are not discussed to some degree.

This is why the National Microsoft BI practice considers a broad range of disciplines when hiring consultants.  The magic quadrant below shows the primary disciplines we look at and how they are weighted.

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As you can see, the standard disciplines are covered but some such as ETL and report writing (although important) are not weighted as high as others.  This is because the value to the client tends to increase as the consultant gains more experience in the ‘higher’ disciplines.

But what about strategy and governance you may ask?  Why are they not weighted as high as say, solution architecture?  It has to do with volume.  In any given BI project, strategy may be discussed; it may even be created/modified; but once the strategy is set, it’s time for the rubber to meet the road, and that happens within the core disciplines of Data Architecture, Analytics, Delivery (SharePoint BI) and Solution Architecture.

The stars in the middle of the diagram represent the average minimum weighted score that consultants typically start with.  The star in the upper right represents the overall value the team delivers to our clients.