With a new year rolling around, BI architects around the world are heading back into work to full inboxes and schedules crammed with new initiatives. Everyone is ripe with hope for the possibilities of a new year and the expectations of exploiting new opportunities and delivering new capabilities to the business. All of us, however, need to make sure that we focus ourselves on our real goal: participating in that partnership between IT and the business to ensure that the BI work we do is of the greatest possible value to the company.
To that end, here’s a handful of the approaches and attitudes we need to cultivate in order to help deliver that value:
Think Mobile… All of your solution strategies from here on out should have a mobile component, even if you keep it in your back pocket until after the initial rollout, and even if the business customer insists they will never take your solution mobile. The truth is that with BYOD spreading throughout companies wanting to give workers greater flexibility (and to decrease investment in worker hardware), mobile solutions will become a standard deployment mode, if not the de-facto method in upcoming years. By baking a mobile strategy into your solutions now, you save the company headaches in the future when the inevitable demand comes to put your solution on smartphones and tablets.
Reduce Your Cycle Time…. RAD/Agile approaches ensure quick successes to build momentum, or confirm miscues before they become too costly. Be prepared to pare development cycles down to the smallest possible increment and reduce scope to the most manageable, so that good and promising work is apparent immediately and steps in the wrong direction can be corrected quickly and cheaply.
Be BI Salespeople…. This is hardly old news, but it bears repeating every single year. Learn how to listen to the business’s true needs and sell solutions that address both their explicit requirements and their implicit ones. Work toward long-term partnerships, and string small successes together like beads on a necklace. Be the bridge between IT and the business — provide the greatest possible value by cultivating effective relationships with honest feedback . You can serve as the conduit, linking business need with IT capability. Don’t be afraid to push both sides toward greater wins for the entire company.
Own The Cloud….. Know how your existing vendors are approaching BI in the cloud, how well-poised or fully-deployed your own architecture and strategy is, how others in your industry are approaching cloud deployments, and what directions your CIO is amenable to. With pressure on every IT organisation to commoditise IT service delivery, cloud strategies are always on CIO’s minds — be prepared to answer those questions. Just like the recommendation for mobile, bake portability into all your designs. You might never know when you’re going to be told to put one of your projects into the cloud.
More to come…
DataHub Writer: Douglas R. Briggs
Mr. Briggs has been active in the fields of Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence for the entirety of his 17-year career. He was responsible for the early adoption and promulgation of BI at one of the world’s largest consumer product companies and developed their initial BI competency center. He has consulted with numerous other companies and is regard to effective BI practices. He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Williams College (Mass).
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