Asking the right questions
February 6th, 2009
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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?
Categories: BI thoughts