Burton IT1 Research G00204018

SelectBI: How to Choose the Right Business Intelligence (BI) Platform for Business's Benefit
Published: 30 June 2010 Analyst(s): Joe Bugajski

Business intelligence (BI) infrastructure teams struggle with a surfeit of expensive BI platforms that generate insufficient business value. SelectBI is Burton Group's framework to help BI infrastructure teams choose the best BI platforms for their customers. In this Burton Group guidance document, Principal Analyst Joseph M. Bugajski presents the three steps of SelectBI. First, the infrastructure team classifies their information consumers. Second, the team matches consumers with analytical artifacts. Third, the team maps artifact consumers to the corresponding components of a BI platform.
Table of Contents
Summary of Findings..............................................................................................................................2 Guidance Context..................................................................................................................................4 Problem Statement...........................................................................................................................5 Guidance Applicability......................................................................................................................6 Related Guidance.............................................................................................................................6 The Burton Group Approach..................................................................................................................7 Classify Businesspeople...................................................................................................................7 Understand Information Artifacts......................................................................................................7 Match BI Platform Capabilities to Artifacts........................................................................................7 The Guidance Framework......................................................................................................................7 Pre-Work..........................................................................................................................................8 Assess the BI Infrastructure for ROI............................................................................................9 Survey Businesspeople for Requirements.................................................................................10 Classify the Business Users of the BI Platform..........................................................................11 Understand the BI Platform Model............................................................................................14 Understand the Information Artifacts Produced by a BI Platform...............................................17

Build a Vendor Shortlist............................................................................................................18 SelectBI: A Framework for Choosing a BI Platform for the Business...............................................18 Technical Requirements Note...................................................................................................19 The Choice Is Not One-Size-Suits-All BI Platform...................................................................19 Map BI Information Artifacts to BI User Groups.........................................................................19 Map the Information Artifacts Required to BI Platform Capabilities............................................20 Follow-Up.......................................................................................................................................22 Risks and Pitfalls..................................................................................................................................23 Gain Business Knowledge..............................................................................................................23 Construct the Business Case.........................................................................................................23 Understand Staffing and Training Costs..........................................................................................23 Control Security and Privacy Risks.................................................................................................24 Conclusion...........................................................................................................................................24 Revision History....................................................................................................................................24 Notes...................................................................................................................................................24

List of Tables
Table 1. Map Information Artifacts to Classes of Businesspeople.........................................................20 Table 2. Map Artifact Requirements to BI Platform Services.................................................................21

List of Figures
Figure 1. BI Platform Architecture (High-Level Design View)....................................................................5 Figure 2. SelectBI Framework Components............................................................................................8 Figure 3. BI Infrastructure Model2...........................................................................................................9

Summary of Findings
Bottom Line: Mismatches between a businessperson's information requirements and business intelligence (BI) platforms is tantamount to pounding a square peg into a round hole. Unfortunately, BI infrastructure teams too often make this mistake. BI platforms can produce valuable information artifacts in accordance with business requirements and analytical activities. A good match among BI platform capabilities, the information artifacts the platform creates, and the business uses for those artifacts will yield powerful business insights. A bad match will yield red ink for a profit and loss (P&L) statement. SelectBI is a framework for choosing the right BI platform and creating valuable information for businesspeople.

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Context: The IT department is often responsible for the execution of a BI initiative, with a focus on deploying analysis tools and data warehouses. That focus includes the technical challenge of integrating data while taking minimal notice of the people, process, and cultural issues inherent in information sharing. In turn, BI tool vendors tend to focus on tool functionality and capabilities; they rarely focus on the softer aspects of BI that will, in the final analysis, deliver business value. Therefore, businesspeople should lead a BI initiative by following a structured approach with strong IT support. Such an approach will ensure a higher degree of certainty that business will derive value in excess of expenses. Takeaways:

BI infrastructure teams may want to buy a one-size-suits-all BI platform, but such solutions do not exist:

Information helps businesspeople develop insights and the rendering of that information is a matter of style, available time, and attention to details. BI infrastructure teams must take pains to learn which businesspeople need which information, at what rate, in what form, and at what level of detail.

Ensure that most businesspeople can get to the business information that they need, when and where they need it, and in the right format; to accomplish this, BI infrastructure teams should:

Choose the BI platform that best suits the majority of business users' requirements. Buy or build supplemental components that work exceedingly well with the main BI platform.

Businesspeople need the right BI tools. BI infrastructure teams must provide business analysts with tools that best meet their individual BI requirements. These include:

Dashboards and scorecards, primarily for business leaders Canned reports, formatted nicely in a web browser; for a client running on a workstation, laptop, or mobile device; or presented as a document, a spreadsheet, or a slide presentation High-quality interactive reports with drill-through links presented with a rich Internet application (RIA) or as a custom report Desktop tools that access the BI platform server directly; these are the online analytical processing (OLAP) programs native to the BI platform

Major groups of BI users include individuals whose position titles or roles may or may not match the following names of BI user groups or BI user classes:

Executive BI users represent about 10% of users of the artifacts produced by BI tools (e.g., dashboards, pivot tables, graphs, charts, or slides).

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Casual BI users represent about 75% of business users of BI artifacts (e.g., BI reports running in a web browser and dashboards, pivot tables, graphs, charts, lists, and tables). Power BI users represent about 10% of the BI information-consuming population; however, this group is the primary target for a BI platform. Such tools include OLAP, Excel plug-ins, visualization, case management, data manipulation, and desktop publication. Statisticians represent less than 5% of BI tool users. They rarely use OLAP tools, but they usually require a particular (i.e., favorite) statistical analysis tool and particular programming languages. BI development personnel also require platforms that enable them to connect to data sources, build custom reports, write and run complex queries, and reliably preserve metadata. These requirements, although important, are not the subject of this guidance document.

BI infrastructure teams must ensure that each of the major groups of BI tool users receive the right tools, data, and support to help them derive value from the business's data collections:

Executive BI users require high quality, aesthetically formatted reports, and real-time access to current financial and dashboard data. They also use scorecards with simple drilldown features. Casual BI users need intuitive, easy-to-use BI analytical tools that help them safely import into Excel, build simple dashboards, and to explore data and collaborate with other businesspeople. Power BI users must have analytical, case analysis, and collaboration tools; multiple, simultaneous visualization tools; and capability to bring novel data sources into their analyses. Such BI analytics experts will also require top-notch training and the occasional assistance of a statistician and BI platform developers. Statisticians need their favorite statistical analytical toolsnot OLAPto access to novel sources of data, and expert advice from programming and data-visualization experts.

Guidance Context
The right business intelligence (BI) platform (see Figure 1) yields market-winning business insight the new meaning of BI. The wrong BI platform adds profit-limiting costs. The right BI platform fits IT's infrastructure like a glove. The wrong BI platform adds horrible complications. The right BI platform helps businesspeople make data come alive. The wrong BI platform frustrates businesspeople and foments discontent. Burton Group's framework for choosing a BI platform, SelectBI, guides BI infrastructure teams toward a good match between a BI platform's capabilities and a business's information requirements. SelectBI does this by mapping information artifacts generated by BI platforms (e.g., reports and dashboards) to classes of businesspeople (e.g., a manager's report or an executive's dashboard). SelectBI then maps BI information artifacts to specific BI capabilities. Therefore, the right BI platform produces the right information artifacts for the right businessperson, and it rewards an organization with competition-leading business insight.
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Figure 1. BI Platform Architecture (High-Level Design View)

Problem Statement
Many organizations have a surfeit of BI platforms and a paucity of people who properly use the BI platforms' tools. Sometimes, this occurs because a BI infrastructure team rushes to buy a new BI platform that it later discovers few people could use. Sometimes the problem stems from lowquality data, or the BI platform using the wrong data. For others, inadequate return on BI investment arises from BI immaturity. For still others, BI's lackluster performance is evidenced by BI process failures. For many organizations, the problem is too many BI platforms but too little BI value, which indicates a mismatch between BI platforms and an organization's information requirements. SelectBI helps IT organizations solve the mismatch problem by helping BI infrastructure teams to select the best BI platform for their organizations. Such a BI platform is one that leads businesses to deliver maximum value from data collections.

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Guidance Applicability
SelectBI helps BI infrastructure teams choose a BI platform with capabilities that meet their business's requirements. SelectBI also helps IT organizations understand the relationship between information artifacts produced by BI tools and the groups of business-information consumers that will most likely benefit from having that information. Finally, SelectBI will support BI infrastructure teams that must reduce the complexity and proliferation of BI tools in environments they control. Note: SelectBI does not include guidance that will help BI infrastructure teams sort out their technical concerns about BI platforms. Instead, SelectBI guides BI infrastructure teams to:

Discern which businesspeople most need which information artifacts Decide what capabilities the complete BI platform must provide, either as a:

Single vendor's BI platform Combination of BI products, BI platform, and custom-built components

To choose the right BI platform, BI infrastructure teams should take these steps:
1.

Match the business's information-generation requirements to specific BI platforms that can generate such information. Ascertain which design tools, library widgets, and data-source connection adapters they will require to configure the BI platform appropriately. Decide which BI platform best fits into the IT infrastructure and which one meets cost constraints. (Note: Technical issues concerning BI platform selection will be a subject of future guidance.)

2.

3.

Related Guidance
Any BI infrastructure provides reporting and analysis capabilities. However, the right BI platform helps business to glean valuable insights from burgeoning data collections. These Burton Group documents guide business and IT organizations to obtain the most value from their BI investments and drive business insight, the new meaning of BI:

To understand how low-quality data negatively affects BI and to learn how to fix this serious problem, read the overview The BI Iceberg: It's What's Beneath the Surface That Matters. To understand how inadequate return on BI investments arises from BI immaturity, read the guidance document A Guidance Framework for Assessing BI Maturity. To develop good processes for using BI tools, see the overview The Business Intelligence Investment: Realizing the Benefits. To understand how so many BI platforms have failed to deliver value commensurate with their costs, see the syllabus Too Much Automation and Not Enough Insight: Navigating the New Normal.

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The Burton Group Approach

Business intelligence (BI) platform vendors often claim that they deliver the highest returns on BI investments. If that were true, then BI platformsavailable for 20 yearswould satisfy business's demands. However, CIOs and CFOs are still concerned about BI. SelectBI defines three steps that partially solve the dilemma:

1

Classify businesspeople Understand information artifacts Match BI platform capabilities to artifacts

Classify Businesspeople
Too often, BI infrastructure teams think of businesspeople as clones, which leads BI infrastructure teams to install BI client applications on every workstation. Although this makes vendors ecstatic, it wastes money. Instead, BI infrastructure teams must learn about business's information needs and understand analytical skill-levels. That knowledge permits BI infrastructure teams to define groups of businesspeople with similar information requirements and analytical skills.

Understand Information Artifacts

The right BI platform generates the right information for the right businesspeople in the form of the right artifacts, on the right computing device, and at the right timeBI's 5 Rs. Therefore, BI infrastructure teams must learn about information artifacts (e.g., online analytical processing [OLAP] cubes and scorecards), understand who uses such artifacts (e.g., analysts or executives), and know when (e.g., every quarter) and why (e.g., to support a market segment) BI information artifacts should be generated.

Match BI Platform Capabilities to Artifacts

Once the BI infrastructure team understands its classes of business users and which artifacts those people need, then the team can decide which BI platform or combination of BI platform components it must acquire to satisfy the business's requirements.

The Guidance Framework

Many IT organizations either have a surfeit of business intelligence (BI) platforms that the BI infrastructure team must winnow to only a few, or they need a new BI platform. In either case, the best BI platform for an organization will produce value in excess of that platform's total operating costs (i.e., solve BI's return on investment [BI-ROI] problem). Figure 2 illustrates the components of SelectBI, Burton Group's framework for choosing the right BI platform for a business's requirements, which will help a BI infrastructure team to solve part of the BI-ROI problem.

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Whether winnowing, replacing, or buying a new BI platform, BI infrastructure teams complete the pre-work steps, then they apply the mapping process of the SelectBI framework using two mapping steps followed by the platform selection and implementation steps. Following implementation, the BI infrastructure team completes the post-work.
Figure 2. SelectBI Framework Components

Pre-Work
To improve the state of the BI infrastructure, the BI infrastructure team must understand the elements of the infrastructure (see Figure 3) and calculate its current annual BI-ROI. The team also must survey businesspeople, even if businesspeople already use BI tools, to ascertain the business's requirements for BI information artifacts by businesspersons' analytical-skill and information requirements.

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Figure 3. BI Infrastructure Model2

Assess the BI Infrastructure for ROI

The BI infrastructure team must set aside its pride and attachments to particular BI tools and platforms before it determines the BI-ROI. In particular, the BI infrastructure team must ask the application portfolio management (APM) team for help with tracking components of a BI platform and its supporting infrastructure. Then the BI infrastructure team should complete this technology pre-work:

Collaborate with the APM team: Help the APM team to record and track dependencies among the BI infrastructure components and the value delivered by each component. Record-related BI infrastructure: Determine the components of the IT infrastructure (see Figure 3) that will directly support the operation of the BI platform that the team plans to select:

Investigate the middleware or network services that connect the clients to the BI platform (e.g., a data services platform [DSP]).

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Understand Burton Group Reference Architecture for communications (see the Managed Communications Infrastructure template). Count the number of extract, transform, and load (ETL) middleware systems. Analyze server instances that interface, or directly support, the BI platform; these include collaboration, operational data stores (ODSs), enterprise data warehouses (EDWs) and data marts (DMs), and analytical engines (e.g., those provided by SAS and open source software R).

Inventory all BI platforms: The BI platforms include those managed by the BI infrastructure team and others in IT or in business units:

Understand client-side components; these include BI platform clients, clients created by applications development teams, custom reporting applications, and web clients. Find all the report-generating platforms (e.g., instances of SAP Crystal Reports or Actuate BIRT). Find all instances of BI servers; thisincludes online analytical processing (OLAP), multidimensional databases (MDDBs), and BI servers that directly access production data. Identify shadow BI platforms, within IT, in business units, and in the cloud that are not under IT's control.

Assure a right-sized BI infrastructure team: Define the number of people who will work actively (i.e., more than 50% of working hours) on any component of the BI infrastructure. Measure TCO: Calculate the total cost of ownership (TCO) for the BI infrastructure (i.e., the BITCO):

Understand operating costs: Calculate the costs of running all BI components. Calculate BI-TCO: Total all costs associated with developing, testing, operating, maintaining, and fixing BI infrastructure components, including the shadow BI systems.

Ask the CIO and CFO for guidance about estimating TCO for the BI infrastructure. Gain agreement about BI infrastructure changes and value that a BI platform must create as a sound basis for a BI infrastructure team's success.

Survey Businesspeople for Requirements

A BI platform that fails to serve business's interests is worse than worthless. Such a BI platform drags profitability below its optimum, and information produced by the BI platform will frustrate business analysts and executives. Too often, BI infrastructure teams spend less time learning how businesspeople work with BI data than they spend bragging about their gigantic EDW or their prowess at developing with a BI tool. To counteract this tendency, the BI infrastructure team must listen to others and collaborate with them:

Collaborate with businesspeople throughout the development of a BI platform.

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Study how businesspeople use BI data to succeed at their objectives:

Understand the business processes from a business viewpoint. Investigate how businesses use data for each step of a business process. Learn how BI information artifacts can prove helpful to businesspersons. Understand how business analysts view information quality and reliability. Work with data governance to correct data quality problems. Use business terminology to talk about BI deliverables and milestones. Ask business leaders to estimate losses due to poor quality BI deliverables. Agree on a monetary value proposition for BI information artifacts. Record business stories about value added or lost due to BI information.

Demonstrate BI information artifacts to businesspeople before coding them:

Present mock interfaces using prototype BI tools. Design BI information presentation to achieve outstanding results. Hire designers who understand user experience (UXP) and report design. Gain the business's concurrence in BI artifact designs.

Calculate the BI-ROI: Build the business case for the BI platform selection, artifact development, and implementation program:

Seek help from costing and valuation experts in the finance office that serves the IT organization. Work with the APM team throughout the BI development process. Aggregate the TCO for the BI infrastructure with the opportunity losses identified by business leaders. Total the monetary benefits that business leaders agree are possible for the right BI deliverables.

Classify the Business Users of the BI Platform

The scope and depth of a BI analysis will vary according to an individual's analysis skills and organizational role. These factors, in turn, should be primary considerations for the selection of a BI tool. Classify businesspeople by their information requirements and their analytical skills. Avoid the temptation to assign businesspeople to a BI-user class without learning about each person's information requirements and analytical skills. For example, a finance group executive might prefer detailed information accessed using a powerful BI tool. However, a sales executive may have no

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propensity for analysis or detailed information. Therefore, the finance executive is not an Executive BI user but a BI power user. Conversely, the sales executive would be an Executive BI user:

Executive BI: Executives have little desire to learn to build analytical results with a BI client application such as an OLAP tool. Executive BI users represent about 10% of total population of BI information artifact consumers. This class of BI users includes non-executives who will have similar requirements, such as the ability to:

View reports prepared by others. Activate links in the reports (e.g., a report appears in a web browser on an executive's laptop or personal digital assistant [PDA]). The executive can activate links by doubleclicking them thereby drilling down into the material. Use BI report data to populate spreadsheets that they manipulate but probably do not publish. Assign the creation of novel BI artifacts to others.

Casual BI: Casual BI users typically need information from BI reports, or they prepare reports with complicated content that they take from several sources. Typically, this is the largest BI user populationabout 75% of the total BI user populationthat for many years, BI platforms left largely underserved. This BI user population:

Views reports prepared by others. Develops new reports from existing BI reports. Activates links in BI artifacts to understand an issue. Accesses reports from a workstation computer or PDA. Exports data from BI information artifacts into spreadsheets or other documents. Modifies existing reports if options are shown in drop menus. Seeks help, occasionally, from more skilled BI users who help them to create novel BI information artifacts. Approaches IT, rarely, for assistance with an analysis.

Power BI: The power BI users determine the success of a BI platform initiative. These businesspeople understand their business units' data and they actively and competently apply analytical tools to business data. BI power users represent about 10% of the total BI user community. They actively pursue data-analysis challenges and they welcome complex analytical tools. These business users constitute the original target market for mainstream BI OLAP tool vendors. They typically:

Create reports for others using BI tools and systems. Visualize and manipulate data using BI OLAP tools. Operate top-of-the-line BI tools running on workstations that they control.
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Pursue detailed case investigations. Rerun analyses, start and stop analyses, and record steps taken during analyses. Collaborate with other analysts when developing analytical findings. Access BI analyses using a mobile device during a presentation or while discussing results with others. Use multiple BI tools if this adds value to an analysis (e.g., create heat maps, hyperbolic trees, and scorecards). Use Microsoft Excel extensively in conjunction with the BI platform's tools. Export data from BI tools into spreadsheets, documents, and presentations. Support casual BI users by creating or modifying reports for those users. Seek a statistician's assistance with applying complex analytical methods to resolve a difficult issue. Seek BI platform developer's assistance with running complex queries if they do not have permission to run Structured Query Language (SQL) programs directly.

Statisticians: These infrequent users of traditional BI platform tools generally have advanced degrees in mathematics, statistics, biometrics, or econometrics. They represent about 5% of the total population of BI tool users. Typically, statisticians eschew BI platform tools as irrelevant to their work. However, this user group is best able to verify the validity of complicated data-analysis procedures (e.g., fraud analysis, predictive modeling, or a risk assessment). The statistician class of BI platform users performs the following tasks:

Writes complex programs using an analytical or programming language such as SAS, R, Java, Perl, or SQL. Reviews reports prepared by other analysts, but only occasionally. Obtains data from any system given the right access permissions. Uses SQL or a scripting language like Perl or Python to pull data and manipulate it for their favorite analytical tool. Creates BI artifacts from statistics-first principles. Applies high-end workstations, UNIX servers, supercomputers, relational databasemanagement systems (RDBMSs), SAS, and SQL access to perform analyses. Avoids OLAP tools. Prepares reports using visualization modalities offered by SAS and its competitors. Works closely with a select group of knowledgeable IT staff members.

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The business users of BI platform artifacts do not include BI infrastructure team members and their development or analytical support interests. This community's requirements are beyond the scope of the SelectBI framework.

Understand the BI Platform Model

The BI infrastructure teams also must understand the components of modern BI platforms before they evaluate a BI vendor's product offerings. Figure 1 shows the high-level model of a BI platform. The high-level model reveals that a BI platform includes development tools and runtime services. Development Tools Most modern BI platforms require a development team to integrate the platform into the BI infrastructure (see Figure 3) using BI platform development tools that BI platform and middleware vendors sell and service. These tools include:

Design tools: BI platform developers use design tools to create the data model for the BI platform, design information artifacts supported by the platform, and formulate ad hoc queries or searches of connected data sources.

Library of report, dashboard, and scorecard widgets: Information artifacts contain buttons, links, and other features that correspond to actions that clients take when they analyze information via the BI platform. Modern, full-service BI platform vendors provide a large number of widgets that developers and business analysts can apply to information artifacts to enable functionality such as scorecard links, messaging tools, dashboard gauges, and interactive maps.

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Data source adapters: BI platforms must connect to an exterior data source, whether or not the platform includes a storage model (e.g., an MDDB or columnar database). The more robust BI platforms differentiate from competitors by providing direct access to a large number of legacy and modern data sources. These sources may include data in the cloud, content repositories, data in enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, master data management (MDM) systems, DMs, and EDWs. Developers use the data source adapter technology to connect to data sources, query them, and transfer data to the BI server.

Runtime Services BI platforms typically provide tools that run on computers operated by businesspeople and servers that run in the data center. Therefore, a BI platform must provide business analysts with access to the BI server using client applications (e.g., in Figure 1, the BI platform services used by businesspeople). Additionally, BI platforms also accept access to their capabilities via custom applications and report generators that include these capabilities:

BI platform business analysts' applications: Business analysts are the target users of powerful data-analysis applications that vendors package with BI platforms. These tools include OLAP cubes (e.g., Cognos) and client-side tools for generating cubes (i.e., relational-OLAP [ROLAP]; e.g., MicroStrategy).

Tools for creating reports, scorecards, and dashboards: A number of vendors are finding ways to permit business users to develop complex reports using client-side tools. Commonly, these reports include dashboards and scorecards. Vendors design such tools for a much broader business-user base than what is possible for the powerful OLAP tools. Such tools include these products: SAP Crystal Reports, Tableau Software, Centrifuge, Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel, and Actuate BIRT.

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Tools for communication, collaboration, and content management: Increasingly, BI tool users and BI platform developers create content that enterprises use to comply with regulatory edicts or make critical business decisions. These reports belong in a content repository that permits an auditor or business manager to trace that report from its inception to its production. BI analysts also increasingly want tools like e-mail, instant messaging, and wikis to permit them to collaborate with colleagues in developing a business analysis. BI platform services for businesspeople should support such requirements.

Most BI platforms include one or more servers that run in a data center. The BI servers receive instructions to perform actions requested by businesspeople who use BI client tools. BI servers include these representative capabilities:

Analysis and query services: These BI server services translate commands from business users' client applications into database queries and content searches. Analysis services also include statistical functions, albeit these fall short of delivering the functionality of a statistical analytical engine, which permits statisticians to implement predictive modeling, develop automated classifiers, and summarize vast quantities of data.

Services for rendering reports, dashboards, and user interfaces: The BI server must accept results of analytical queries and format them into reports, dashboards, OLAP cubes, scorecards, documents, spreadsheets, and many other information artifacts. The rendering services provided by the platform provide these capabilities.

System services: BI servers use the system services to connect authorized business clients securely to sources of data (e.g., EDWs and ODSs). Certain BI servers also provide data reformatting and data transformation capability.

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Data model and metadata services: A BI platform requires a data model to make it work. The data model services relate data stored in sources external to the BI server to data represented by that BI server's data model. The metadata services system tracks metadata and calculation rules used by the BI client tools. Certain BI servers can lock metadata to assure auditability and traceability for BI platforms that create government-mandated reports.

Automation and administrative services: BI platforms permit developers and business analysts to publish reports according to a schedule and to repeat analytical processes. The automation services provide this capability. Administrative services provide access to the BI server during runtime to allow system administrators to maintain access permission, check the health of the BI platform, and start or stop the server.

Understand the Information Artifacts Produced by a BI Platform

BI information artifacts come in many shapes and sizes, and some provide complex interactive functionality (e.g., drilldown and drill-across). Such information artifacts typically derive from BI analyses that address a complex issue (e.g., meeting a regulatory reporting requirement) or the status of a business process (e.g., current transaction volume and rate). SelectBI includes these classes of BI information artifacts:

Reports: Any document generated by a BI tool that businesspeople review, including dashboards, pivot tables, graphs, charts, lists, tables, heat-maps, hyperbolic browsing images, animations, and two- or three-dimensional images. Dashboards: These documents, typically viewed online, are summaries specifically designed for executives. Dashboards typically provide status of complex business processes and events, sometimes based on historical data and sometimes based on real-time data. Scorecards: These documents, typically viewed online, present interactive data about progress toward business goals. Like dashboards, scorecards may summarize recent history, but typically these information artifacts resemble scorecards and displays that sports teams use to track the progress of an event (e.g., the contents displayed by a basketball, football, or baseball scoreboard and the scorecard in the program). Interactive diagrams: These are reports; usually images, graphs, and charts; that query data stores in real time. These reports contain objects that represent a set of BI analytical operations. Typically, interactive diagrams provide the easiest-to-use analytical processes of any analytical tool. Cubes: Commonly called OLAP reports, cubes are multidimensional arrays to data that have three primary components: facts, dimensions, and metrics (also called filters):

Facts constitute the detailed information concerning a business event (e.g., the actual remittance paid against an invoice).

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Dimensions are data values over which analysts will aggregate facts (e.g., total remittances by customer by month). Metrics are computing operations that act on facts and dimensions. Metrics include settheoretical, arithmetical, statistical, and relational calculations.

Customizable clients: BI platforms usually provide BI development staff with the ability to design and build programs that use application programming interfaces (APIs) provided with the BI server. Custom clients also include webpages that access BI platform results, reporting applications built by other BI tools vendors but that work with the BI server, and search engines. Query and search: Every BI server provides the capability to translate program actions into database queries or content searches. In particular, BI information artifacts can include query results that the BI server does not render. Statistical models: Most BI platforms run basic statistics on business data, and most provide capabilities to assemble elementary statistical models. Typically, an elementary statistical model provides summary information about data sets including averages, correlations, regressions, and probability curve fitting.

Build a Vendor Shortlist

Use Gartner's magic quadrant and research and follow Burton Group's guidance to create a shortlist of prospective vendors for a new BI platform. Learn about each vendor's capabilities to support the enterprise from the beginning to the end of the relationship. Understand how vendors support IT and business, provide technical advice, deliver training, and offer customer service. Evaluate platform capabilities and record strengths and weaknesses. Then apply SelectBI to choose the best platform for the enterprise from the best vendor. Work against the incumbency bias. The BI platform market is poised for change. New market entrants may confer a large competitive advantage for the business. Finally, consider working with a small handful of vendors to deliver the complete capability that the business demands of successful BI platforms.

SelectBI: A Framework for Choosing a BI Platform for the Business

All modern BI platforms deliver reasonably similar capabilities but businesspeople do not necessarily have the patience or skill to use BI tools. Similarly, all modern BI platforms provide excellent software development kits (SDKs) that BI developers use to design custom reports and run complex ad hoc queries. However, not all BI developers understand BI infrastructure issues well enough to develop top-quality BI reports or write efficient database queries. Therefore, the BI infrastructure team must assure themselves of relatively complete knowledge about BI platform capabilities before committing the organization to a particular solution. Furthermore, BI infrastructure teams must recognize that one-size-suits-all BI platforms do not existdespite vendors' protestations to the contrary. Instead, a great BI platform features the best components from BI vendors that deliver capabilities that are consistent with business requirements.

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Every businessperson has unique propensities for analysis of detailed information. The BI infrastructure team must discern who fits which class of BI users and supply each person with a BI platform that meets their requirements.

Technical Requirements Note

Whereas SelectBI is a framework that helps BI infrastructure teams choose the best BI platform for business, it does not address SDK requirements. Development for BI platforms is a distinct problem from developing artifacts that businesspeople will use to the benefit of the business's operations. Choosing the right BI platform for a business is the harder of these two problems. Therefore, this framework examines the solution to the business problem. Future documents will help BI infrastructure teams sort through these not inconsiderable issues that surround choosing a BI platform with the right SDK for their BI developers.

The Choice Is Not One-Size-Suits-All BI Platform

SelectBI does not necessarily indicate that the BI infrastructure team should choose a single BI platform. Indeed, one-size-suits-all BI platforms do not exist. Therefore, the BI infrastructure team should select the vendor's BI platform that meets a preponderance of the requirements then supplement that platform with additional tools, perhaps from different vendors, or tools that an inhouse development team builds for the BI platform. SelectBI is a Burton Group framework that helps BI infrastructure teams choose a good BI platform and solve the BI-ROI problem.

Map BI Information Artifacts to BI User Groups

The team responsible for the BI platform selectionthe BI infrastructure teammaps the activities classifications of business consumers (see the Classify the Business Users of the BI Platform section of this guidance document) to information artifacts (see the Understand the Information Artifacts Produced by a BI Platform section) to the most appropriate information artifacts for that group. Table 1 illustrates this mapping.

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Table 1. Map Information Artifacts to Classes of Businesspeople Information artifacts vs. businessperson classification Reports Dashboards Scorecards Interactive diagrams Cubes Customizable clients Query and search Statistical models Mandatory Optional Optional Executive BI Casual BI Power BI Statisticians

Mandatory Required Required Optional

Mandatory Optional Optional Required

Mandatory Optional Optional Required Mandatory Optional Mandatory Required Optional Mandatory Mandatory

The cells of Table 1 show mandatory information artifacts in bold font. The BI platform must have the capability to support the production of these artifacts. Required information artifacts appear in italicized font. The BI platform should have basic capability to produce these information artifacts. The BI infrastructure team should investigate the capability of a BI platform to generate optional information artifacts while they weigh the associated costs and benefits. Blank cells in Table 1 indicate that a class of businesspeople does not need the corresponding information artifact.

Map the Information Artifacts Required to BI Platform Capabilities

The BI infrastructure team then maps the mandatory and required information artifacts to BI platform capabilities (see the Understand the BI Platform Model section of this guidance document). Table 2 illustrates this mapping.

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Table 2. Map Artifact Requirements to BI Platform Services Artifacts by BI platform capability Client-side services Server-side services

Analysts' application Reports Dashboards Scorecards Interactive diagrams Cubes Custom clients Query and search Statistical models Mandatory Required Mandatory Optional Optional

Artifact tools Mandatory Required Required Required

Collaboration

Analysis services Mandatory Required Required Required

Rendering services Mandatory Mandatory Required Required

Automation services Analysts Optional Required Required

Required

Optional

Mandatory Required

Required Required

Required

Mandatory

Optional

Required

Required

The map of information artifacts to BI platform services (see Table 2) shows mandatory, required, and optional components for a BI platform. The BI infrastructure team must assess its shortlisted vendors' product offerings (see the Build a Vendor Shortlist section of this guidance document) according to the requirements maps. Three or four vendors whose BI products meet a preponderance of the requirements would be good choices for detailed analysis. After the BI infrastructure team chooses at least three vendor's BI platforms for a final evaluation, the team should evaluate the BI-ROI (see the Assess the BI Infrastructure for ROI section). If a platform fails to meet the ROI, the team should eliminate it from consideration and choose a different platformor combination of platformsand evaluate the ROI of that selection. Finally, the BI infrastructure team should put the two highest ROI-producing BI platforms through a battery of tests (e.g., concept test, pilot test, and user evaluations).

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Follow-Up
With a BI platform decided, the BI infrastructure team is ready to start architecture, integration design, and BI artifacts development. As is necessary to meet the business case, the BI infrastructure team must initiate its plan to consolidate BI platforms, upgrade BI platforms, or select new BI platforms, then start designing the BI infrastructure to accept the new BI platform:

Gather architectural guidance: The BI infrastructure team must collaborate with architects from enterprise architecture, data management, applications development, BI infrastructure, transaction processing, and other source data systems (e.g., ERP or customer relationship management [CRM]) to:

Ensure that other architects participate in reviews of the BI platform design, development, and implementation plans. Coordinate design reviews with the larger community of architects to help everyone understand BI data flow requirements and the uses to which BI tools users plan to put such data.

Measure BI information quality(BI IQ): BI IQ is the second-most important measure after BIROI. The BI infrastructure team uses it to assess progress and advise a BI steering committee. Indeed, low BI IQ will probably mean BI platform failure. Measuring BI IQ requires the team to:

Measure the quality of the data assets in the BI platform Measure the quality of the data assets produced by the BI platform Test metadata for consistency with published conceptual and logical data models and expected data statistics. Ensure that the BI platform meets business requirements for information accuracy, reliability, timeliness, integrity, and consistency. Advise data governance councils of serious problems with BI IQ. Work with BI infrastructure teams and data-source system teams to correct defective data.

Review BI-ROI: Work with a BI executive steering committee to assess progress in meeting the business's requirements and the success of the business case. Routinely assess the performance of the BI platform relative to the business users' requirementsthis is a fundamental input to APM and future investment decisions. Adjust the BI platform: A BI platform is not a static entity that the BI infrastructure team leaves alone after putting it into production. Following the development and implementation program, the BI infrastructure team should routinely survey business users to ensure that the BI-ROI is positive and consistent with the business value forecasted in the business case.

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Risks and Pitfalls

The business intelligence (BI) infrastructure team must take care to understand business requirements of the BI platform in some detail. The team should also carefully construct the BI platform business case to assure that it is conservative in estimates of both cost and value. In addition, the team must be wary of committing to BI information artifacts before it understands development and analyst staffing patterns, and the development and analysts' training commitments that vendors and consultants recommend to create those artifacts. Security and privacy are sources of risk that many BI infrastructure teams fail to understand; then they fail to take precautionary steps to control risks.

Gain Business Knowledge

The BI infrastructure team has an obligation to learn how businesspeople will use a BI platform to develop business insights, avoid opportunity losses, and investigate opportunities for revenue gains. This is a tough challenge for most BI infrastructure teams. Business processes vary significantly from one area of business to another. For example, financial reporting requirements for public accounting bear little relationship to market financial forecasts, yet both discuss similar numbers. The BI infrastructure teams have two choices to assess requirements. They should work their firm's market data analyst or hire an independent consultant with such knowledge. In either case, the job is to define costs and revenues that BI business use-cases achieve with BI technology.

Construct the Business Case

The business case should be neither too aggressive in its value generation nor miserly in its expense controls. BI infrastructure team members should ask a financial planning expert in a business unit or the finance office to assist with the business case. An overly aggressive value proposition is one that seeks faster value growth than is reasonable for the business. An overly aggressive expense forecast is one that tries to minimize costs at the expense of risk mitigation. In either case, such miraculous results always prove unlikely, albeit excitement with a new BI platform may tempt a BI infrastructure team to make unwarranted assumptions about possible financial gains while minimizing risks. Instead, the business case must take a conservative stance toward value generation and risk controls.

Understand Staffing and Training Costs

BI platforms are complicated affairs. Often a BI platform requires constant oversight, and a successful BI infrastructure team always has more work to complete than time or developers to complete that work. Additionally, analysts may underestimate the amount of time they need to learn to use BI tools. The BI infrastructure team can help to solve both issues by experimenting with the BI platform, by insisting that BI platform vendors provide an initial training program before the team purchases a BI

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platform, and by seeking advice from an independent consulting firm that specializes in BI platform implementations.

Control Security and Privacy Risks

BI platforms are powerful sources of business insights. They also often contain individuals' identity information and proprietary business information. Such information requires security and privacy protections. The BI team leader and the executive steering committee should ensure that the BI platform team engages security architects and that these people and the BI platform design team meet with the privacy, risk, legal, audit, and compliance officers to ensure that the team manages risks appropriately.

Conclusion
SelectBI is a framework for business intelligence (BI) infrastructure teams to use when they must choose a BI platform that businesspeople will use happily and profitably. This means the BI infrastructure team must learn individual businesspersons' reporting and analysis requirements. The BI infrastructure team also must uncover the right information sources, data timeliness constraints, and data availability in accordance with reporting and analysis requirements. Finally, the BI infrastructure team must ensure that the BI platform works within the IT infrastructure and the complete BI infrastructure.

Revision History
June 2010

Version 1.0, initial publication.

Notes
The New Voice of the CIO: Insights from the IBM Global Chief Information Officer Study. An IBM survey of over 2,500 CIOs at face-to-face meetings. IBM. See Figure 2 on page 11. Jul 2009. http:// www-935.ibm.com/services/us/cio/ciostudy/. (Note: IBM requires registration in order to access the referenced document.)
2 1

MCI refers to the Reference Architecture template Managed Communications Infrastructure.

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