One of the most common challenges for organizations today is not to implement
Business Intelligence or Performance Management but rather to manage the growth
of these capabilities!
We can efficiently funnel a vast amount of raw Data into some valuable business Information only to see it funnelled outwards in
volume again when it becomes hundreds and thousands of Reports and Analyses.
The Cost of Growth
Growth commonly takes the form of web portals with hundreds if not thousands of reports
or analyses. Both IBM Cognos and Microsoft offer search capability in their business intelligence platforms to help
users find specific reports. There are also more powerful optional searching capabilities available on both platforms.
But simply finding the right report is not enough. There is a tremendous cost to the organization in users spending
time searching through the haystack of reports for the single needle of information that they need. There is also a lot of
cost involved in managing and maintaining all of these reports.
Usually uncontrolled growth results from an organization that has been information
starved for a long time. When presented with real actionable business information there are no processes
at either the organizational or individual level to manage how the information is structured and consumed.
Getting Growth under control
- Pick one area (a department, a set of reports, a reporting portal) and invest
the time and energy to clean it up so that every remaining report or analysis is
valuable.
- Assign ownership of the cleaned up area and start by saying that only that person or team
can add new content.
- Promote the new area via email announcements, an open house, free mouse pads -
whatever works in your organization.
- As growth continues unabated in other areas the well managed area will stand
out and other members of the organization will begin asking for something similar.
Choosing the right tools
It often seems that unrelated growth in business intelligence reports and analyses comes from not matching the need carefully
to the toolset. Extra reports and analyses get created as report developers refine how the information should be delivered. Since
each permutation may have some value to some audience - these artifacts tend to hang around.
- Reports - lead to action. Valuable reports are valuable because they provide a unique perspective on information that
can lead directly to action by a specific person.
- Alerts - notify of exceptions, things that you think will occur rarely but are critical to know about if they do occur.
- Dashboards - monitor what is happening now. These are operational day to day things you need to track frequently for ongoing
business success
- Scorecards - measure progress against specific objectives over time periods
- Analysis - supports decision making by allowing rapid iterations through multiple dimensional perspectives on the information.
For example, being able to rapidly look at encounters in a period and then instantly break down those encounters by diagnosis code.
Advanced Techniques
Clearly define the different stages in the lifecycle of new reports and analyses and then
manage that lifecycle. For example, it is helpful to clearly delineate areas where prototypes or experimental reports will be
stored to separate them from production quality finished reports. Use Sandboxes to provide rapid access to data that is not yet
Trusted Information but has high and immediate business
value. Define a simple process to then integrate this data into the data mart in order to make it Trusted Information.
Manage the density of information. Ensure that the information density is not so low that it takes five or six reports to gather
enough information in order to take an action. Also ensure that reports (or especially dashboards) are not so dense with information
that they are difficult to interpret and there are too many possible actions to take.