November 18, 2003

From Strategy To Execution

How can business intelligence improve the whole information value chain? The answer requires a network approach that integrates standalone applications and data resources to deliver timely intelligence across the enterprise

by Lelia Morrill & Hemant Warudkar

Continued from Page 1

A BINI makes a company agile and dynamic, with a current and future focus. It's a system that enables enterprisewide, end-to-end monitoring of business activity up and down the value chain. The project life cycle is fast compared to other BI enterprise implementations because it's focused on outcomes, not on the generation of intelligence, which should be handled by each business unit. Instead, the core BINI functionality is movement, formatting, storage, and distribution of already generated intelligence. If the BINI can transform data into intelligence or if, by its very existence, the data is intelligence to another unit, then it's considered corporate intelligence and is fit for moving through the framework.

A BINI with a business activity monitoring (BAM) focus is a monitoring environment, not an interactive analysis environment. Most executives and management only want to see the bottom line. Analysis is the responsibility of each business unit. The BINI provides the integration architecture for the value chain; it's the glue that binds silo business-unit intelligence together, whether generated from operational functions, Excel, a data warehouse, OLAP, or data mining.

With a BINI in place, a company doesn't have to look to OLAP or the data warehouse to provide the enterprise infrastructure needed for optimizing the value chain. If the company wants to develop enterprise analysis, then OLAP and data mining tools used against a data warehouse can leverage the BINI. If those outcomes become valuable to running the value chain, they can be integrated into the BINI.

A BINI can provide future interfaces to the following technologies without requiring any upfront investment:

• Data warehouse, for historical and mined analysis
• OLAP, for dimensional reporting of operational and historical data
• ERP BI, in concert with ERP applications
• Collaboration tools, for more interactive involvement of users
• Workflow tools, for precisely defining value chain flows with highly engaged users
• EAI, which takes the BINI to real time.

BINI Components

The difficulty and complexity in developing a BINI comes in designing for a common intelligence integration scheme, from both a data and process point of view. As with any enterprise implementation, business units must agree on what's needed, what the sources and targets are, the basics of intelligence definitions, and the overall business activity flow and sequencing. The infrastructure itself includes four standard, recognizable components: integration architecture, business knowledge, an experienced team, and the technology.

Integration architecture. The integration architecture is the framework for bidirectional pathways that deliver shared intelligence to core business applications and BAM dashboards. It includes:

• An integration platform, the tool (we used ETL) with which the design and management of all formatting processes take place and which transforms data to information or intelligence while accounting for the differing views and formats needed by each business unit
• The business architecture, which evolves into the business activity flow and becomes the framework for a fully event-driven BINI
• An intelligence architecture, which comprises shared intelligence from and to the dashboard and each application; it also forms the foundation for the OIS. The OIS houses intelligence shared by two or more applications and information needed for enterprise analytic reporting and enterprise-level compliance reporting. The OIS also is the foundation for the star schema that provides dimensional views of activity metrics to the dashboard. (If interaction is needed, OLAP should be leveraged.)

Business knowledge. A sound, relevant BINI requires business participation. The necessary business ingredients include:

• Knowledge of core intelligence per business unit
• The ability to generate intelligence within each business group
• The ability to receive, decipher, and use intelligence from other business groups.

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