Data Warehousing, Business Intelligence & CPM

How do you want your data?: Chris Bradley, IPL (April 2010)

Most organisations today have a business intelligence and data warehouse solution of some sort. The maturity of this technology has moved on from departmental and then operational BI to the position we now see in many corporates – ‘enterprise BI’. The availability of a new generation of BI tools and solutions which easily integrate with ERP systems has undoubtedly provided real benefit. However, the information explosion, the plethora of tool options available and information regulation and compliance, together present companies with two key challenges: 1. Data migration and ETL vs EII (or both?). By now most IT users will be familiar with the purpose of extract, transform and load (ETL) tools. Less well-known, however, are the capabilities of data virtualisation or enterprise information integration (EII) tools such as Composite or MetaMatrix.

Business systems project framework

This template provides a graphical view of every action in an IT project – the key deliverables, who should run each project element and who should sign every element off.

Guide to project planning

The project plan is the backbone of all project management. It defines what is to be done, how it is to be done and when it is to be done. The project plan identifies responsibilities for providing the specific products that will ultimately deliver real business benefit. A poorly planned project may be delivered late and cause frustration to everybody involved. Needless to say, a poorly managed project will probably be more expensive to deliver than a well-planned one. 1. Project plan overview. A detailed project plan will add gravitas and credibility to all decisions made during the life of the project.

Guide to investment appraisal

Many businesses have numerous project requests which need to be prioritised and assessed, and every business wants to quantify the financial benefits of a project before proceeding. There are a number of ways of evaluating projects and this document outlines the most common methods – using capital and ongoing project costs and comparing them with projected business benefits. As with any model, the results are only as good as the quality of data provided in the first place. It is important that all project costs (internal as well as external) are captured and that the business benefit numbers are supported by the associated managers.

Business requirements document

This is a key document for the whole project. It defines the most important measure against which everything else must be benchmarked – business value. The Business Requirements Document defines the business need and the commercial opportunity. Before considering technology or other solutions, it is essential that business managers are clear about the business outcome they want to achieve and why. The problem or opportunity should be described in business terms and should be clear enough to enable someone with no previous knowledge of the business to understand the context of the requirement.