Pierrekiroule Consulting

Following up on the BI strategy, here is a non exhaustive list of questions to ask before planning and implementing a BI project:

1 – identify the business needs:

• What is the business of this organization, and what is the purpose of their reporting needs?
• What kind of reports are needed:
  • Decision support?
  • Performance management?
  • Dashboards and Scorecards?
  • Customer oriented, financial?
  • System analysis?
  • Data Quality?
  • Enterprise BI?
  • Data Warehousing?
  • Master Data Management?
  • Predictive Analysis?
• Are the needs local to a department or general?
• Are the needs reproducible or would they be generated on an Ad-Hoc basis?
• How will reports be used:
  • Embedded and read in another document?
  • Printed and archived for historical purpose?
  • Accessed on line (intranet or extranet)?
  • Accessed on a mobile device?
  • Presented during a projection or in a book?
  • Scheduled on a time or event based frequency?
  • A mix of the above?
• What will the retention of the report be, should historical reports be kept?
• Can we define each reports or groups of reports:
  • What is the purpose of the report?
  • What are the metrics of the report?
  • How should the report be sorted, ranked, filtered?
  • In what format should the report be presented: tabular, chart, cross tab, a combination?
  • Are there calculations involved? Exceptions highlighting? What are the business rules for these?
  • What are the selection criteria for this report? Are these criteria pervasive across reports?
• Who should access the reports, who needs them?

2 – What are the technical constraints?

• What is the budget for the BI project?
• What is the time line for the BI project?
• What kind of security applies to the content of the reports or system and how is this security handled and applied: at the system, the database or the report level?
• Where is the data stored?
  • Is is easily available?
  • Is there a test environment?
  • Is it a multi-sources report?
  • Are some of the content not available in databases?
  • Are some of the content stored in proprietary systems (such as ERP, etc…)?
• How clean is the available date, would there be any data cleansing required?
• Is the data “report ready”, or are transformation or transfer required and possible?
• Is the operational system accessible, or should the data be duplicated? How often, how “fresh” should the data be? Are there any concerns in accessing the operational database?
• Metadata: are they defined, needed, accessible?
• Are there non structured information involved?
• Is there a corporate graphic chart to follow (for portrait, landscape, web reports)?
• Are there some technical constraints: platform, OS (client and server), web browser, Database, network, security, login, hardware (RAM, CPU, etc..)?
• What languages should the reporting project be available in?
• What training is planned or scheduled?
• Are there other existing similar projects we could rely on or improve?