7 Habits of Highly Effective OLAP Development TeamsThese strategies can help your development team converge skill, desire, and knowledge in a manner that promotes ROI
By Norman Comstock Continued from Page 1 HABIT 4: FOCUS ON THE CONSTITUENTSYou may have noticed a common thread among the first three habits: constituents. Reflect back on Marketing 101. You may recall that a marketing mix is the set of controllable marketing variables that a company blends to produce the response it wants in a target market. Naturally, this marketing mix is largely dependent on customer (that is, constituent) preferences. Preferences indicate that people are capable of making choices based on their personal tastes. In the 1989 film Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner plays an Iowa farmer haunted by an ethereal voice in the cornfields chiding him to replace part of his crop with a baseball diamond. The somber voice from the cornfields whispers, "If you build it, they will come." So he builds the field. I won't ruin the ending of the movie if you haven't seen it, but I will say that, indeed, many people did come. That strategy may work in the movies, but if you were to map the concept "If you build it, they will come" to the business world, there would be many empty ballparks. Don't answer whispers from the field if you're responsible for building an OLAP solution. If you deliver a solution, you probably want to make sure that the end users come back over and over again, thereby bolstering the ultimate return on your OLAP investment. It is more cost effective for you to know your customers' preferences first so you can build them a solution worth using. HABIT 5: LISTEN FIRST, THEN EXECUTEThere are many concepts of the physical world that have made way into the digital world, especially with respect to construction. Terms like architecture, blueprint, prototype, model, and scale come to mind. Of all the applicable construction phrases, this is one you should definitely incorporate into your digital vocabulary: "Measure twice, cut once." This phrase is analogous to Habit 5: Listen first, then execute. Cutting before you have measured can be very expensive. Building an effective OLAP solution is the result of acute listening skills and timely execution. Hence, it is in your interest to take copious notes when interviewing your constituencies. Publish the notes and recycle the thoughts until the business process, analysis, and direction are clear. Clarify the business terms and derived formulas that the constituents use. At a minimum, there should be consensus about the meaning of any special terms peculiar to the company or constituents. Process manufacturing concerns often refer to "throughput," but the definition varies across departments within the same company. For good reasons, some of the constituents will be referred to as subject matter experts. If subject matter experts are available, seek them out, listen carefully, and distill your understanding via your solution blueprint. HABIT 6: COLLABORATEIt stands to reason that if you're practicing Habits 1 through 6, you're well steeped in a team effort. Ideally, this process has gathered the right group of people to ensure success. There is a clear division of labor; roles and responsibilities have been clarified. But when does the effort become truly collaborative? One person may ultimately be responsible for the OLAP solution, but many people should be involved. Although one person, for example, may be able to foster ideas that yield calculation efficacy, logical partitioning, or storage design, presentation aesthetics is one area ideally suited for group activity. This is important to understand, because that's where you have the most exposure: A bad first impression is hard to overcome even if the back-end design and process is very sound. To collaborate, you have to be willing to cede a little bit of control to allow different thought processes to infuse each other. When you're contending with complex analytics and dimensional hierarchies — especially when it comes to presenting multidimensional data — two or more heads are definitely better than one. If there is just one concept that you must understand about building OLAP solutions, it's that presentation of multidimensional data and analysis is crucial. Initial user acceptance isn't the final mile. Rather, the litmus test for a truly successful OLAP solution is dependency: You want the various constituents to become dependent on the solution, and the only way to do so is with a compelling, engaging presentation layer. Let the users interact with the presentation layer early in the development cycle. Catalog all the positive and negative reactions from a few members from each constituent group. After addressing the negative feedback, let them test drive again. Two things will happen: First, you'll come up with a more intuitive, engaging presentation for that group. Second, you'll gain advocates in the groups that you want to serve. HABIT 7: REVIEW, ANALYZE, ITERATEA business must face the winds of change. There's a constant twisting of known variables and introduction of new variables. Companies that adapt to the changes rapidly will not cede their competitive positions due to complacency. Indeed, they're constantly reviewing, analyzing, and iterating through their data troughs to glean new information to understand how to appropriately respond to the ever-changing needs of constituents. A natural occurrence that plagues myopic decision systems is atrophy due to complacency. With enough neglect, the once solid solution can be slated for demolition; OLAP solutions have been scrapped after relatively short periods due to atrophy. Consider the cost of such a decision. Regular maintenance and tuning is less costly than replacement. You can choose to be proactive or reactive. It seems clear that regular, periodic review of the solution in place is important. Following each review you should analyze what is effective, what new features are required, and which features need to be retired. PRACTICE GOOD HABITSOLAP solutions are increasingly considered an integral component to address the analytic needs of business. OLAP technologies, skilled people, and financial wherewithal are the raw materials necessary to bring solutions to fruition. However, these resources must be channeled through thoughtful planning and execution. Otherwise, your field of dreams will more resemble a nightmare. Norman Comstock [ncomstock@damanconsulting.com] leads Daman Consulting's OLAP practice. For more than a decade, he has evangelized the importance of OLAP as a tool for quality decision support. RESOURCESPendse, Nigel. "What Is OLAP?" The OLAP Report: www.olapreport.com Related Articles at IntelligentEnterprise.com: "The Tail That Wags the Dog," Oct. 4, 2001 "Business Critical Prism: A Strategic Assessment Guide for BI Products," Oct. 4, 2001
|
 |
Most Popular This Week
IE Weekly Newsletter
Subscribe to the newsletter
| |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
