In my February blog, I wrote about basic BI categories so we could assess our BI environment. If you recall our BI categories were as follows:
- Type I – Reporting and Query tool sets
- Type II – Analytic tool sets
- Type III – Predictive Modeling tool sets
Now, we can gather some facts to measure our current BI state to determine who we are as BI consumers. And it gives us a great opportunity to determine if our IT Strategy matches our Business Strategy. What we want to know is, “How can we improve our IT Services for the Business we serve?”
As an Enterprise Architect, I look at the following areas:
What are my BI spends? I like looking at all accounts payable for the previous year for all 3rd party software vendors and BI vendors. In most cases, you’ll know which BI license component each spend represents (BI base engine, OLAP component, data mining, etc). If in doubt, you can easily contact the vendor.- What are my BI reports? I examine all of my metadata where I can take an inventory of the BI reports, recognize the source databases being queried for each report (and what Web Services are being consumed), and determine how often each (canned) report is run? For ad hoc reporting, most BI toolsets will provide metrics for measuring ad hoc efforts.
- Take an inventory of all BI Servers (DEV, TEST and PROD). Create a simple topology diagram showing server, CPU, RAM and storage.
- Finally, I want to examine the metrics for my BI user community. Do our SLA metrics measure up to expectations?
You should be able to gather the BI spends in less than a day or two of effort. Following the money trail, you may find rogue BI efforts where a department has purchased a server and BI toolset. What’s the big deal? If your rogue group is publishing values from unaudited data sources, it creates miscommunication. It’s like having a duplicate set of books. Also, they’re spending operational dollars to maintain their private BI infrastructure. BI vendors love to go around enterprise architect to sell licenses to increase their profits at your expense.
In a past life, I was able to stack appls on fewer, beefier servers and eliminate dozens of small servers to provide a small BI spend while improving BI Service. You can expect a 30-50% savings just on BI licenses, servers and maintenance. And we created Centers of Excellence, where BI specialists could assist departments in converting to your BI toolset standards and leverage this Corporate Core Competency across the enterprise landscape.
Next, I like to see what databases (and tables) and what OLAP Cubes are being utilized. Am I applying my human capital to the right places? Bug fixes and enhancement requests will help us measure where the fires are taking place. Also, do I have reporting data sources that are not being used? If so, why are we spending business capital on obsolete resources? And I’m sure we’d all agree we have canned reports that we run, but no one reads the reports. These are great candidates to rename, archive, and remove them after 90 days. You may see response times improve after removing this excess baggage.
Now, I can inform management that of my Type I, II, and III spends. I can state how many OLAP servers, data marts, etc. that I deploy. And now, I can reflect on my BI type percentages of total spend. If I find my Type I spend is 90% then I know I’m not deploying ad hoc reporting and my user community is less engaged in exploring their data. Is this good? It depends on my business strategy. If I have a dynamic market place, I want to empower my users so many I need to rebalance my BI infrastructure. I like creating “AS IS” and “TO BE” diagrams to show how we can re-allocate valuable resources.
Finally, I can also measure BI satisfaction from my BI metadata. CMMI and Six Sigma call for SLA where the business community can set metrics to hold IT accountable. The right metrics help all of us to become more competitive in the global marketplace. Take ownership, and lets become good stewards of our BI landscape.
