A look into BI Roadmaps: Part I - What is business roadmapping?

Gartner defines business intelligence (BI) as an umbrella term spanning the people, processes and applications used to organize information, enable access to it, and analyze it to improve decisions and management performance. Conversely, many organizations are often focused on reporting and not decision support – all while management asks for decision support solutions such as interactive dashboards. What if the delivered dashboards and the operational reports are not linked through common key performance indicators? One end result of this practice is ineffective, reactive, and cost prohibitive decision-making. An effective BI solution, when implemented under guidance from Gartner’s definition of BI, will allow an organization to cut costs and compete more effectively by enabling better business outcomes through more proactive decision-making.

What if an organization is only focused on report management? Is this a poor practice? Not if done properly, as report management is the evolutionary foundation for BI driven decision support. Proper reporting means the output must be effective and actionable to add value to the organization. What if the reports deliver unorganized lists of data and these lists are provided in an ineffective medium? Users will inevitably extract and summarize or even scan through these lists of data to produce information. What if the information outcomes are not aligned with the business objectives of the organization? In these cases, information becomes a hindrance, adding cost and time to account for shortcomings in standardized meaningful information delivery and usage. A model BI solution is aligned with pre-defined organizational business objectives and deliverers trusted targeted actionable information to the right users at the right time in the right medium, not lists of data. So, how does an organization map a strategy to accomplish this?

A proven approach is to build a performance management BI roadmap. The roadmap engagement starts with gap assessment used to evaluate the current state and the desired state information and infrastructure needs for the organization. This gap analysis is subsequently aligned with the identified, documented, and confirmed organizational business objectives. Finally, this information is used to architect eloquent BI solutions supporting business objectives based on the desired state of BI. The BI solutions could range anywhere from actionable managed reports to comprehensive balanced scorecards. The resulting roadmap is a strategy meant to guide an organization in creating business objective aligned proactive, actionable, and effective information driven BI solutions.
The image below is a sample of PerformanceG2’s information / infrastructure current state to desired state gap matrix resulting from our in-depth gap analysis. In practice, there are two different matrices developed, one for business information and one for people, process, and technical infrastructure. The gaps are determined as a part of technical and business related interviews conducted during a roadmap exercise. We use this and other industry proven applications to develop the comprehensive roadmap.

Tune in next week for Part II of the Roadmap series blog, to learn the elements of a successfully built roadmap.

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Our online training courses include: Cognos Framework Manager, Report Studio, OLAP Modeling with Transformer, Business Insight and Business Insight Advanced, Query Studio/Analysis Studio, and Cognos TM1.

For more information about our online Cognos training courses, visit http://performanceg2.com/online-cognos-training/, email us at training@performanceg2.com, call 877.742.4276, or access our online Cognos training course catalog.

Cognos Insight is Here

Check out this great video describing IBM's Cognos Insight product and  experience a new level of analytic freedom with IBM Cognos Insight, the personal analytic solution that empowers you to independently explore, analyze, visualize and share your data.

For more information connect with one of our experts at training@performanceg2.com or visit our website: http://www.performanceg2.com

Configuring IBM Cognos 10 to use Microsoft IIS 7 ISAPI

Watch this short Cognos training series video to learn how to correctly set up IIS 7.x to use ISAPI with Cognos 10.

   

Connect with us at training@performanceg2.com for more information about our Cognos training. Plus visit our YouTube channel to subscribe to our Cognos training series videos.

Consulting Available

I suggest you to take the official Cognos training classes - or at least read the book...

With that said... if you need some real-world advice I am able to help.

Please contact me via this blog!

Season's Greetings

Hi

as you can see there was no activity on my side on this blog in 2010.
Despite that (or because of that :-) ) you've been commenting and visiting the pages. Thanks!
I wish you all happy holidays.

thanks for keeping this blog going!

Hi folks!

As you may have noticed, I haven't been posting actively for quite a while now.
From time to time I see people asking questions in comments and responding to each other.
I just want to thank you for keeping this blog active.

The good thing is that since I stopped posting new articles the number of page views are climbing ;-)

ps. Can you spot the Xmas break?