“Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

Sun Tzu

BI Strategy

 

Current BI solutions have various challenges and shortcomings in delivering the required value to the business. Typically, they are primarily technology focused and only managed on a very operational level. The most significant weaknesses are:

 

¨ The timely availability of information for the business to make pro-active and effective decisions.

¨ The lack of data integrity – correct and complete.

¨ The control and management of business definitions and rules – metadata.

¨ Limited ownership and governance of the information assets, especially on management levels.

¨ Mostly focused on “bottom-up” data driven requirements as opposed to “top-down” information driven requirements.

 

Understanding these weaknesses and their relative impact in the overall context, is critically important before further investment in BI.

To derive business value from BI, requires a combination and synergy between people, process and technology. Such a complex business environment is best defined and managed by means of a BI architecture framework whereby all the different components can clearly be specified and integrated. The BI strategy process builds on the architecture framework by firstly determining the “as-is” BI architecture followed by the design of the “to-be” BI architecture. Planning the transition involves both a long term strategy and shorter term tactics.

Plan • Do • Measure