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AVOIDING PITFALLS WITH BI

AVOIDING PITFALLS WITH BI

Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

business intelligence (BI) processes, which are predicated on pulling together data from multiple source systems and consolidating it in data warehouses for analysis. But data management analysts warned that a BI data integration strategy can quickly go awry if it isnt well designed and properly executed.

ata integration is a critical component of

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REAL-TIME DATA ANALYSIS RECIPE CALLS FOR MIX OF IT, BUSINESS SAVVY
Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

With complex event processing tools, data virtualization software, business process integration products and other advanced and still-emerging technologies at the heart ofreal-time data analysis systems, deployments require a certain level of sophistication to tackle the technical challenges that lie ahead. And beyond the technology-related hurdles there are significant political and process issues that can trip up companies onreal-time analytics projects, impeding their ability to deliver operational intelligence that helps improve decision making and business performance. Avoiding those pitfalls requires a well-choreographed implementation plan that gets IT,business intelligence (BI)and business managers on the same real-time page. At the outset, many organizations get off on the wrong foot by pursuingrealtime BI and analyticssimply because it's a widely hyped technology, without first going through the process of building a formal business case. "A lot of times you have IT in charge of what's going on, and they make the call to go real time or near real time because they can," said John Myers, an analyst at research
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

and consulting company Enterprise Management Associates Inc. in Boulder, Colo. "They're not asking, 'Does this technology fit the business case?' They're saying, 'This is really cool and we should do it.' " Blind pursuit of technology for technology's sake can also mask some of the inherent complexities associated with real-time analytics. One of the most important issues to figure out, Myers and other analysts say, is ensuring that an operational system can supportreal-time analysiscapabilities without any performance degradation on the transaction processing side.
MISSING OUT ON REAL-TIME BI REQUIREMENTS

Companies often also underestimate thedata integration requirementsof a real-time system or don't fully understand the scope of what's needed from both a technology and a project planning and management perspective, according to Lyndsay Wise, president and founder of WiseAnalytics, a midmarket BI and data visualization consultancy in Toronto. "A lot of times smaller organizations don't end up budgeting for the different components," Wise said. "They want an analytics platform and set aside a certain amount of money, but they don't realize there's a data management side, a data delivery side as well as a data integration side." As a result, she added,
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

"they end up not setting proper expectations" on the overall project cost. As analytics moves directly into the operational realm throughreal-time initiatives, business expertise and involvement become even more important than they are on traditional BI projects. "You need to have operational training and knowledge of how the business runs to do [real-time analytics]," said Colin White, president of consulting company BI Research in Ashland, Ore. "Just as the dividing line between what's operational and what's analytics is becoming gray, the dividing line for people in IT has to be gray." The key to success often is removing the line between business operations and the BI team altogether, White said: "Otherwise you run into conflicts about technology selection and budgets."
TOO MUCH INFORMATION GETS IN THE WAY

Collaboration between operational managers and workers and the BI team is also crucial to buildingbusiness intelligence dashboardsthat make sense for the job at hand, said Roy Schulte, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn. BI developers "sometimes design real-time business dashboards as if they were designing a daily or weekly dashboard or report," he said, resulting in cluttered screens with more detailed information than operational users need to make
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

minute-by-minute decisions. Instead, dashboards for real-time data analysis applications should be designed "to convey a small set of urgent information quickly" while giving users the opportunity to drill down into the underlying transaction data when necessary, Schulte said. He also recommends that the dashboards be complemented by an alerting mechanism that sends email messages to the appropriate users when a real-time system detects business problems or opportunities. Another big factor in makingreal-time analytics deploymentswork is ensuring that people and processes are in place to deal with the information and analytical findings being generated so the initiative can have a positive impact on business performance. Typically, that involvesrethinking business processes, retraining workers and changing operational procedures to make an organization more responsive to customer purchasing decisions, fluctuations in financial markets and other business developments. In fact, if business units aren't in a position toact on real-time intelligence, or if operational systems aren't fully equipped to handle real-time data feeds, a company will find itself investing money and resources in a program that has little chance of getting off the ground, warned William McKnight, president of McKnight Consulting Group in Plano, Texas.
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

"You don't want to let the cart get ahead of the horse," McKnight said. "If you haven't developed analytics [processes] to the point where you can really do something with the information and make an impact on the business, the use case is diminished."

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DATA ERRORS, OTHER MISSTEPS CAN WAYLAY BI DATA INTEGRATION STRATEGY

Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

Data integration is a critical component of business intelligence (BI) processes, which are predicated on pulling together data from multiple source systems and consolidating it in data warehouses for analysis. But data management analysts warned that a BI data integration strategy can quickly go awry if it isnt well designed and properly executed. For example, Claudia Imhoff, president of consultancy Intelligent Solutions Inc. in Boulder, Colo., said bad timing can spoil everything: Data needs to be loaded into a data warehouse in time to be used for the planned BI purposes. Fully understanding an organizationsBI requirements, particularly when users need real- ornear-real-time access to data, is amust for BI and data integration teams, Imhoff said. Good data quality is just as important, according to Imhoff, who said that correcting and cleaning upbad datashouldnt be a function solely of theBI data integration process. Errors are happening everywhere else along the way, so you need to figure out where they are coming from, she said -- and then work
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

to prevent data mistakes from finding their way into source systems in the first place. In effect, Imhoff added, data integration and BI professionals are given the job of consolidating faulty data and then get the blame when it isnt perfect. We need to get people to understand that they shouldnt just shoot the messenger, she said. Ted Friedman, an analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn., thinks that not paying enough attention todata qualityis the biggest BI data integration danger companies face. Ive been following data integration for more than 10 years, he said. And I still spend days talking to organizations that are not getting the usage and trust and acceptance and value out of their BI efforts because the quality of the data is not good enough, and they havent done the right things to fix that. Data quality problems clearly affect more than BI data in wayward organizations, Friedman said, but he seespoor data qualityas one of the primary barriers tosuccessful BI programs. The shortcomings, he added, typically result from not focusing [on data quality] early and often enough, and simply not doing enough to mitigate quality issues as information is moved into data warehouses. James Kobielus, who was an analyst at Forrester Research Inc. in
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

Cambridge, Mass., before taking a job with a technology vendor earlier this year, also pointed to missteps on data quality as a common source of trouble for BI data integration efforts. Organizations think they can simply load data from their various back-end applications into a data warehouse and it will be usable without cleansing it or doing match-and-merge or transform [processes], Kobielus said while he was still at Forrester. But doing so sets up companies for some nasty surprises, he added. For example, they end up with six records on the same person and dont know which one is the right one, Kobielus said.
BI DATA INTEGRATIONS DRAMATIC EFFECT

Another big source of inconsistent data, and drama, stems from internal debates over what constitutes asystem of record, said Jill Dyche, co-founder of Baseline Consulting in Sherman Oaks, Calif. For example, she noted, there can be arguments about which transaction system should be used as the source of customer addresses. Such conversations often then turn to the definition of address: Is it a customers billing address or shipping address, or its headquarters location if that differs from the other two? Thats when the arguments ensue and business people become disaffected
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

with the BI teams ability to understand and deliver the right data, Dyche said. So then someone just decides to forklift everything into a single database, which the business people then refuse to use. Barry Devlin, founder of 9sight Consulting in Cape Town, South Africa, thinks the most problematic mistake is not including the right people in the process of crafting a BI data integration strategy and plan. The people who really understand data and what it means are a particular subset of the business community who have been playing with data over the years -- they are the gurus and the power users, Devlin said. As a result, he added, theyre best equipped to define what data needs to be integrated in order to create effective BI applications. But in many cases, its left to the IT department to develop the data integration plan in addition to doing the implementation work, Devlin said. While IT pros may have a reasonable understanding of an organizations data, to Devlin they arent the real experts. Bringing the two groups together to work on BI data integration can be a challenge, but its a must, he said. Imhoff said there also is a strong tendency, especially in organizations that are new to BI, to inadequately scope the data integration requirements of aBI projectand then put together an unrealistic schedule for delivering whats
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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

needed. Integrating data and loading it into a data warehouse can take up as much as 60% to 80% of the overallBI developmenteffort, Imhoff said. And, she cautioned, a project team that tries to do too much of that at one time can end up falling flat on its face. You cant eat the whole elephant at once, she said.

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Home Real-time data analysis recipe calls for mix of IT, business savvy Data errors, other missteps can waylay BI data integration strategy

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