1. Optimize the BI Program for a Better ROI
Squeeze more juice from the fruits of your BI labor.
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2. Introduction
Business Intelligence (BI) programs are costly ventures. Optimizing your BI program is essential for realizing greater return on your investment. Organizations must aim to embed BI as a mission critical component of every work program in a cost effective way.
This Research Is Designed For:
This Research Will Help You:
CIOs and IT managers charged with managing the enterprise business intelligence program.
Business intelligence professionals looking to fine-tune BI deployments.
Introduce the critical components of BI optimization.
Provide guidance on BI strategic development.
Diagnose the health of your BI program.
Recommend best practices for healing the most common BI ailments.
Use this research to develop an optimization strategy that increases the use of BI in your organization and decreases the cost of delivery. Establish a vision for BI and fine-tune your people, processes, and technology to create a business-centric BI program.

3. Executive Summary
Gaining more value from your BI investments means providing better information to more users at a lower cost of delivery.
The challenges facing organizations looking to extend the reach of their BI program are the same as those that face organizations during their initial deployment.
Organizations must gain buy-in from targeted groups, encourage end-user adoption, manage the accompanying changes, and ensure that BI capabilities address the real needs of the business.
To be successful, there must be:
A strategic vision to guide the BI program.
A governance framework for managing change.
Adequate training and change management for staff.
More efficient development processes and standards to reduce technology costs.

4. Optimize BI Extend Reach and Capabilities
Build a Vision for Enterprise BI
Align the Business and IT
Optimize BI
Govern the Process
Empower the People
Reduce Fragmentation

5. Optimize a BI program in three ways: extend reach, enhance information & decrease the cost to serve
The BI value proposition:
The value of BI lies in its ability to provide information to the business in a timely fashion so that it can answer business questions and support business decisions.
The three main optimization opportunities:
Increasing the reach of BI by making it available to more groups/users (BI for the masses).
Enhancing the information that is ready for use by improving the functional capabilities available to end users.
Reducing the cost of delivering information to end users.
An optimized BI program delivers improved functionality to more users at a lower cost to serve.

6. Functional Capabilities
End-user adoption, end-user abilities, and BI fragmentation are the main obstacles to optimization
Obstacles
Extend Reach
Extend
Functional Capabilities
Reduce Costs
End-User Adoption
End-User Abilities BI
Fragmentation
Underutilized BI capabilities result from:
Lack of vision for BI
Poor business/IT alignment
Insufficient staff training
Lack of a BI culture
BI fragmentation and higher costs result from:
No BI standards
Deploying BI as a point solution
Inefficient development approach 1 2 3
Optimize
Poor end-user adoption results from:
Poor governance
Lack of executive accountability
Poor change management
Insufficient training
IT driving BI

7. End-user adoption, end-user abilities, and BI fragmentation are the main obstacles to optimization
Reach
Functionality
Cost to Serve
Establish a Vision
Embed BI as an integral component of all business work programs and measure against corporate objectives.
Align with business needs and leverage tool capabilities in order to meet the information needs of all user groups.
Part of the vision for BI must be how IT is going to manage ongoing maintenance and support and increasing demand.
Govern the Process
Effective governance – in particular executive sponsorship – encourages end-user adoption.
A BICC can create and embed enhanced functionality that provides better and more timely information to users.
Governance reigns in haphazard BI deployments and provides an oversight mechanism for lowering costs.
Empower the People
Proper end-user training allows users to feel comfortable using BI tools minimizing pushback.
With proper training, users can create custom functionality by building their own reports and tools.
Self-sufficient end users reduce the strain on IT helpdesks and can find answers to their questions at a lower cost.
Reduce Fragmentation
Make use of reusable components and adapt to business needs quickly.
Understand the layers of the BI architecture to aid in making design choices.
Standardize on a BI solution whose capabilities and product roadmap align with business needs now and in the future.

8. Vision
Create a vision for BI by enabling the corporate strategy and supporting business processes with technology
All enterprise applications, especially BI, must be designed and implemented to enable strategic objectives and the business processes that support them.
Establishing a vision for BI depends on the alignment of the technology development lifecycle with the business strategy lifecycle.
The goal is to derive business requirements from the corporate strategy and develop enabling technologies that can deliver the requisite information to business users.

9. Aim to embed BI in regular business work programs where performance can be measured
BI needs to be viewed as an integral component of business operations.
At a minimum, Reporting and Analytics must be part of every company initiative for performance management.
For every initiative, e.g. new campaigns, new products, etc., ask the question “How are we going to measure success?”
For example, in a marketing campaign management program, you would need metrics to evaluate the success of each campaign objective and the marketing strategy overall.
Metrics could include:
Types of campaigns
Response rate of campaigns
Take rate (% of individuals that purchase the product)
Campaign Management Strategy
Campaign Objectives
Campaign Action Plan
Implement BI to Measure
Success
Embed BI in Regular Work Processes
Initiate Action Plan
Measure Results
If a certain project has measurable ROI, we will document that. But now BI is just the cost of doing business and part of the infrastructure. A better measure of success is the growth in the number of uses for the data and the number of users who are successfully getting the answers they need to their business questions.
- Successful Business Intelligence: Secrets to Making BI a Killer App by Cindi Howson

10. - IT Services Consultant
Successful BI initiatives are characterized by a strong alignment between the business & IT
Business/IT alignment refers to the degree of mutual collaboration between the business and IT. Organizations with strong business/IT alignment are characterized by a high degree of trust and shared decision-making between the two functions.
A major aspect of building business/IT alignment is ensuring that IT initiatives (including BI) are relevant to the needs of the business. IT should have a comprehensive understanding of what business users require from the BI tool set.
It’s important to avoid a “build it and they will come” mentality: legitimate business needs should be the driving factor behind BI deployments.
Build a strong relationship by finding a champion for BI in the business. The more senior the champion, the more likely that the business can lead the charge. The ideal champion is someone in a senior executive role, such as a CFO or COO.
Most organizations have shared responsibility for BI need identification
There are aspects of the BI project that the business won’t understand, and there are business requirements that the IT people shouldn’t guess at.
- IT Services Consultant
Ideally, the business should be in the driver’s seat for BI. IT should support and enable the business. The stronger the business/IT alignment, the more likely BI will be adopted and successfully utilized by business users.

11. Make BI as scalable as possible: scalability drives adoption and allows for rapid deployment to new areas of the business
A scalable approach to BI can be a powerful method for helping to drive adoption while reducing the time and costs associated with rolling out BI to new departments and business units.
Scalability refers to those solutions which can be easily and inexpensively deployed to new users or user groups.
A scalable BI solution is one that expands tools to new users without large increases in infrastructure, software, or support costs.
Users
Number of BI Users
Total $
While scalable solutions typically require more up-front investment, they pay off as the user base expands.
Users
Number of BI Users
Total $
High end-user adoption is one of the hallmarks of optimized BI. As such, a BI solution that can be painlessly “scaled up” to new users or departments is tremendously valuable.

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