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October 24, 2001

Standing at the Crossroads

There are many directions you can take to solve a BI challenge, but which approach will meet your organization's unique needs?

Mark Smith

Determining how to fully evaluate software products is not easy, and business intelligence (BI) products pose that challenge in spades. In "The BI Tool Conundrum" (Aug. 10, 2001), I explained the challenges and confusion surrounding BI tools and some key aspects for you to consider. This issue daunts so many companies that in "Business-Critical Prism: Strategic Assessment Guide for BI Products" (Oct. 4, 2001), I provided a complete project process and methodology, DecisionCycle, to provide specific guidance for your BI project. The article also included in-depth assessments of BI software products to give you a better understanding of how you can use this process and methodology.

Why is this all so important? Well, I have found that organizations spend significant amounts of time struggling through the vendor-selection process. Organizations' confusion and lack of consistency regarding how to align business requirements to functional requirements, determine a vendor shortlist, and evaluate software products have distracted and impeded their ability to leverage software technology for competitive advantage. Faced with so many different solutions for the same business problem, organizations need a broader set of company and technology criteria to evaluate vendors and their products.

ONE CHALLENGE, MANY SOLUTIONS

Even though many businesses are just trying to do the BI basics - providing information and analytics to large numbers of users across the organization - they must still sift through numerous schools of thought regarding the best way to meet these challenges. For example, you can approach the task of information delivery as either an easy project of delivering reports or as a way to align individuals' actions to the needs of the business. But what if delivering static reports on an automated basis will only add to users' information overload? You may also determine that providing access and delivery of personalized and relevant information will have a significant effect on individuals' daily actions. As a result of these considerations, you may decide to only deliver the metrics or facts to which users have subscribed or been delegated by management, with information tailored to roles and responsibilities. Furthermore, monitoring and alerting capabilities that can intelligently determine the right users to deliver information to at the right time could be a critical factor in determining the best approach for your company.

As you can see, although both approaches meet the business requirement of providing information to a large number of users, you must weigh the advantages of an easy project against exponential gains in efficiency and responsiveness within your organization. In either case, a business must fully understand the many possibilities and evaluate development and deployment scenarios that meet its business requirements.

This example demonstrates the importance of a broader set of criteria that explores various possibilities and methods of meeting your business requirements to fully evaluate software products. Criteria spanning both business and technology areas will help you score vendors' products and determine your vendor shortlist. This process is not easy as it is unique to every business and its specific business goals and requirements. Subjective market perceptions or vision-and-execution vendor ratings can't compete against a methodical process that ensures an objective approach to vendor product selection.

DETERMINING YOUR EVALUATION CRITERIA

The DecisionCycle methodology I outlined in my Oct. 4 article covered steps 1 through 6 of the Project Process (shown in Figure 1) and focused on scoring BI products based on their ability to meet the functionality requirements of your users to arrive at a preliminary master list of vendors. But product functionality is only one of the criteria for selecting the vendors that most closely meet your project needs.

The last two steps of the Project Process narrow your list of vendors further with criteria tailored from commonly known requirements to determine the best match for your company's broader needs.

You can use the following business and technology areas as the foundation for defining more specific questions for vendor evaluation:

Usability. Individuals must be able to access, analyze, and deliver information at any place and any time. You must determine if the product's capabilities align to the user-community needs. The product must be able to adapt to the skill level of the class of users as outlined in step 4 of the Project Process.
Integration. Integrating internal and external information requires a robust platform and architecture. You must determine how well the product can integrate information into your existing enterprise infrastructure or applications. In many cases, you will need a platform and architecture with technology integration points that your systems (enterprise applications, portals, or underlying application server products) can access.
Manageability. You must determine what resources you will need to deploy, manage, and maintain the BI project. This consideration should include the amount of work to drive the project to deployment, the administration that will need to be in place to support the user communities, and the additional human and financial resources needed to sustain the project.
Reliability. Addressing the overall BI needs of the enterprise requires user and information scalability and performance. You must determine the product's ability to provide access and resulting functionality for your data and information systems and total number of defined users. You can then measure the product's performance by how long the product takes to complete the task that meets a user's specific needs. The product's underlying architecture can have a significant effect on the scalability and performance of the BI systems.
Functionality. User communities require specific features and capabilities. You must determine the specific functional capabilities that users need to reach the defined business goals and requirements. Although steps 3 through 5 of the Project Process evaluate functionality extensively, your results should be part of the final scoring in the business and technology criteria as well.
Adaptability. Achieving the functionality needed to satisfy a specific business requirement often involves at least some customization and development. You should consider how much customization a baseline product would need to meet your needs before deciding on a buy-or-build approach. Keep in mind that the product should be flexible enough to ensure that you can adapt it to meet future business requirements as well.
Validation. Proof that the product can meet its stated capabilities and that the vendor will provide support throughout the project's life cycle is critical. You should validate the vendor's ability to deliver with customer and industry references. You should also evaluate the vendor's management team across product, sales, marketing, and service to confirm their domain expertise to support your application of the product. In addition, you should evaluate the vendor's financial viability and ability to continue developing and maintaining the product.
Cost of ownership. You should determine the actual cost of implementing, deploying, and managing the project. This area is typically where validation and manageability criteria play a critical role in determining the total amount of investment required. This evaluation should include the analysis of the software and supporting hardware costs, which can also help you understand the needed architecture and supporting scalability and performance for the required functionality.

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Keep in mind that you should not derive so many questions from these areas that determining which vendors most closely align to your project is cumbersome. Typically, your final list should be three vendors. The result of this process is an objective scoring mechanism for vendor evaluation. Once you have completed the process, you can begin a proof of concept or prototype with the vendors to validate their ability to deliver on the BI project.

RECOMMENDATION

A successful BI project requires that you select vendors based on their ability to meet your specific company and project needs. Using the Project Process and DecisionCycle methodology can help you drive your BI project in the right direction. You can then leverage the business and technology criteria areas I've outlined to define the specific questions to evaluate the final list of vendors that best match your project needs. Only by focusing on the business priorities can your BI project meet and exceed its goals and expected benefits.

Mark Smith [mark.smith@fullcirclestrategies.com] is principal and founder of Full Circle Strategies and an expert in the applied use of information through leveraging analytics, business intelligence, and performance management.