Business Intelligence Integration
How to Integrate Business Intelligence within Your Organization
Before you Integrate Business Intelligence into your Organization
Business Intelligence has developed into strategic process over the years of its extraordinary growth, even so it still needs to be incorporated into each business process with great care in order to properly lead business operations onto the path of attaining their individual strategic objectives.
Before an organization attempts to integrate a Business Intelligence system into their operational or analytical systems they should be certain to be sure that they effectively clean up the system before combining it with an operational system. They can do this by first establishing the consistency across all of the Business Intelligence tools and data stores by noting the common data names, definitions, and integrity rules that concern all of the data for the systems.
Also steer clear of different names for the same measure in differing Business Intelligence data stores or tool business views. Avoid different formula for measures with the same data names as well. Keep common metadata in a repository. Verify a common Business Intelligence platform of integrated tools from the same vendor for all of your Business Intelligence development.
Don’t assume just one approach for Business Intelligence integration. The organization will need to recognize that there are different closed loop strategies needed to integrate Business Intelligence into operations from different roles with in the enterprise. An example of this is how an organization’s executive needs Business Intelligence integrated into customer performance management software, where as a customer service representative inside of the call center will need Business Intelligence integrated into a designated operational application.
When your organization is prepared to begin integrating Business Intelligence
Begin by linking corporate performance management scorecards to the exiting dashboards and analytic applications by establishing the metric trees in the corporate performance management tool that are used to calculate the scorecard key performance indicators. The key performance indicators should be calculated from the underlying lower level metrics. This enabled managers to extract from scorecards all the way into detailed data to identify the reasons why there is an issue.
Center the Business Intelligence integration on realizing a specific prioritized organization objective, such as minimizing operational costs. Next the organization needs to establish a method for identifying where the Business Intelligence applications are needed and when those applications will be needed. This process also concerns identifying who in the organization contributes to the same business objective.
From there the organization must identify their role in the company, the applications they use most frequently, whether they have time to use a new Business Intelligence tool or need Business Intelligence integrated into specific applications. The organization will also need to identify the Business Intelligence applications that they need to help them contribute to the common objective.
This identification process also needs to include identifying the business process tasks each application performs and the actions the organization needs to take and whether they need to collaborate with others before taking action.
An organization can implement Business Intelligence internet services by taking advantage of web service API’s available from a Business Intelligence application vendor. These Business Intelligence web services allow the organization to effortlessly integrate Business Intelligence into port lets in organization and Business Intelligence portals. These services also enable an organization to vigorously integrate with other applications as well, and with out the need to hardwire business integration into applications.
For the fastest results and those who need to work in partnership over Business Intelligence before making a final decision, it is possible to integrate Business Intelligence applications into the organization’s portals so that the users can take full advantage of the portal collaboration tool to conduct net meetings and even threaded discussions of the Business Intelligence content that is being considered. The strategy is well suited for managers and executives. Even so the strategy may not be appropriate for operations personnel who are connected to certain application when they perform their primary job function.
Finally an organization should use real time processing and business activity monitoring to integrate on demand recommendations into their customer touch points and for any dynamic web personalization driven by customer intelligence.
How do you know your Business Intelligence was poorly integrated?
There are very obvious warning signs that the integration of a Business Intelligence system was unsuccessful. The integration should be smooth and pose little if any major issues. If managers are arguing about differing analysis results even when data came from the same source or if higher ups are uncomfortable signing off on financial statements.
Some other warning signs include decisions changed due to the discovery of data that was not obtained originally. Analysts alert management that potential problems are being discovered while running queries against the data in operational systems, and the analysts are unable to distinguish how long the problem has existed.
As a result of an out-of-stock condition for a crucial part, an organization must accelerate an order and buy the item at a superior price. Then once the order arrives, the company discovers that another area had a surplus of the very same part and had been trying to sell the part at a discounted price to balance its inventory.
Even more warning that there is a problem may be that while analysts use a variety of diverse Business Intelligence tools to produce reports from the organization’s application systems, they re-enter applicable summary principles into a spreadsheet for any analyses demanding data from more than one application. Also a problem may be present with a sequence of very persuasive charts and graphs; an executive demonstrates what seems to be a thorough analysis of the root of a specific issue.
A problem that is personally even more distressing, is that while the layout of the report meets all reporting requirements as if it were a work of art, the executive’s trustworthiness suffers to a great extent when someone says that the true meaning of the data was never touched upon and asks what data was used to form the report as if they have no idea what is being expressed.
Data Integration (Building Vs. Buying)
As a customary law, unless the data integration process is truly going to be a solitary endeavor, organizations are almost always somewhat duty bound to ardently take into account the benefits of a packaged data integration solution.
The interim preliminary costs related to an internal software design effort are even more probable to be lower than the procurement cost of a packaged product. Even so continual future upkeep costs and the secondary costs associated with incapacity to act in response quickly to alteration will just as rapidly exhaust the initial cost savings.
In addition to the initial costs, the productivity resulting directly from the capability of most of the more popular commercial data integration packages to incorporate and distribute metadata with other data warehouse tools of the like is something that most internal solutions simply do not regard as possible or offer to make available.
Of unique many importance’s the competence to share metadata with modeling and blueprinting or design tools and the Business Intelligence tools that will access the data warehouse is particularly important. Commercial data integration packages are also more likely to be integrated to include data quality and data profiling tools, a practicality that is habitually overlooked by original, internal development efforts.
So in view of data integration tools to be had by a database vendor, it’s imperative to acknowledge that one of the chief strong points of a database vendor’s unique data integration product can also be one of its most significant draw backs.
Bear in mind vendors often heighten their solutions for populating their own databases. In truth, some offerings, with the likely exclusion of also producing flat files, can only populate a vendor’s own database. Therefore in conclusion it is prudent to assume that the choice between building and buying an integration solution relies heavily upon the needs and financial stability of the organization
