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BI Architecture Services
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Business intelligence is a complex concept, impacting many aspects of your organization. To build
BI successfully, you're going to need a lot more than just technology. Businesses who have tried to
"purchase business intelligence" have discovered quickly, and in some cases very painfully, that
there's a lot more to it than that. No matter how new and shiny (and expensive) that BI packaged
software is, it won't magically produce effective cross-functional reporting, predictive analytics,
trend and statistical analysis, ad-hoc business querying capability, scorecard balancing, or any of
the other incredibly powerful benefits of BI.
Let's explore some of the things you'll need to be successful:
A Rock Solid Value Statement
There has to be a clear vision for your BI initiative. This vision leads to strategic goals, which
must be written in the language business leadership will understand. This means that the system
will have to return concrete value proportional to its cost, which will be substantial. And it's our
experience that you have to do more than deliver value — you'll have to do so early and often to
keep the business writing the checks necessary to be successful.
Far too many BI initiatives are kicked off without an air-tight value statement. The costs and
benefits are not clearly articulated or understood. As a result, the project is under funded and
hampered by skepticism, and could even potentially fail. Make sure you have the right people,
with the right experience and knowledge, helping you build your business case. Get someone — like a
Capstone BI architect — in-house, who knows where the pitfalls are, how to maximize value, and how
to communicate it to the business.
The Right Person Sponsoring the Initiative
This is not something that Capstone can do for you, but it's absolutely critical to the success of the initiative.
At the end of the day, successful BI is more about having the right people in play than any other
variable. From expert help in architecting the system to knowledgeable developers, actively involved
business owners to the program sponsor, the people will make or break what you're trying to accomplish.
Here are some quick tips. The project sponsor must:
- Be responsible. They have to be the chief advocate for the initiative, have the authority (direct
from the C-level), and be accountable (where the buck stops).
- Be first and foremost a business person, knowing the political landscape and the ins and outs of
the business. BI should not be an IT initiative.
- Have cross-functional clout and focus. The whole organization owns the initiative and will have
to be involved. BI cannot be (even perceived as being) owned by a single business unit.
- Be a diplomat. Leading a BI initiative means building bridges and brokering peace agreements.
Effective Data Governance
Most organizations have a pretty lofty vision for business intelligence. In order to achieve those goals,
intentionality is required concerning the roles, responsibilities, systems, processes, decision rights,
and accountabilities which govern enterprise information. This means you might have to hire someone, add
new roles, and move responsibilities around in your org chart. Capstone BI architects know the best
practices and have experience in other organizations like yours. We can help you set up the organizational
structures, processes and policies necessary to achieve your goals.
For more information, check out Capstone's recent presentation on
building effective data governance.
Right Data Architecture and Modeling
Data warehouses, the brain of an effective BI infrastructure, are different from the databases which drive
transactional systems. Your transactional systems are your front office. If you sell widgets, the underlying
database is optimized for selling widgets — many inserts into the database of one record at a time, the same
function (built to fulfill a single user requirement) executed over and over again, etc.
Data warehouses are a completely different animal. They are (or should be) designed for online analytic
processing (OLAP), not selling widgets (or whatever your business does). Data warehouses are accessed thousands,
sometimes millions of rows at a time. They're essentially read-only. And the queries being run change
constantly, because that's the whole reason you want BI in the first place — to allow you to find the new thing,
not do the old thing a million times a day (like selling a widget). These queries unearth new knowledge and insight,
rather than performing the "same old" daily business operations you've been doing for years.
So, if the data sources that drive BI- and transactional systems are so different, then it stands to
reason that their data architecture would be fundamentally different too. Capstone BI architects understand
this. Let us help you get up to speed on multi-dimensional data modeling and other BI-centric data architecture
skill sets, so that your data warehouse and BI applications can do best what they were created to do.
Capstone's BI architects know that these factors and many more play a key role in your success, long before
the particular product or technologies used to build a solution is even discussed. Capstone offers architectural
services to our customers by offering to staff a seasoned BI architect on your project with your project team.
Our architects then serve as mentors and guides to the project team, the initiative sponsors, and your
organization in general. They can help chart a course to successful delivery of BI within your unique
environment and to maximize your return on investment in business intelligence.
If you don't need a BI architect onsite full-time, Capstone offers services contracts which effectively put
an architect on retainer for your organization. Ask us about our "Capstone Consulting Units", or CCUs,
which are a bank of pre-purchased hours customers can use to access expert architecture or development
resources when and where you need them.
And of course, Capstone can assist you by building your entire BI application, if needs be. Check out our
Custom BI Software Development offering for more details.
Let's take a quick look inside a few of the tiers of a well-architected business intelligence
infrastructure. Capstone's BI architects can bring to your organization knowledge and experience
in all of these areas, to help you get the most out of your investment in BI.
 ETL Technology
To become accessible to BI systems, data created by transactional business processes must
be extracted from data sources around the enterprise, transformed
into a new data model, and loaded into the data warehouse. This
process and the tools that support it are typically abbreviated "ETL" for "Extract, Transform, Load".
Capstone BI architects can help you plan, implement, and deploy the ETL tools you need to support
the BI application / components your enterprise needs. We are vendor-neutral, experienced in many
technologies, enabling us to help you select tools and technologies with only one thing in mind:
the best solution to your unique challenges.
 The Data Warehouse
As we mentioned above, the best data warehouses are designed specifically with online analytic processing (OLAP)
in mind. We find that this type of modeling and architecture is commonly foreign to our customers. Make sure you
have the skills and knowledge you need to make your BI projects successful. A Capstone BI architect can help.
For more information about data warehouses and the services Capstone offers, visit our
Enterprise Data Warehousing Services page.
 The OLAP Layer and Data Marts
In order for data to be presented to meet specific user requirements — for reports and dashboards and such — it is
typically packaged into data marts specially designed to meet specific requirements. The data warehouse is a universal
repository; the data mart is a specifically crafted data source leveraged for an exact purpose. Capstone can help
you manage requirements, create reusable data and software modules, and help you avoid the pitfalls of duplicating
and silo'ing data. Capstone can help you establish this critical interface layer between the data warehouse and the
presentation components which make it accessible to your users.
The BI Presentation Layer
The top of the BI architectural stack is the part that everyone sees and which gets the most press: the presentation
layer. Comprised of various types of components ranging from widgets to reports, dashboards to scorecards, even
totally custom desktop applications, the presentation layer is the window through which the end user accesses BI.
There are literally dozens of vendors who offer fantastic tools to build BI presentation components. Capstone has
experience with many of them. We can help you put in real business query tools (sometimes called
"ad-hoc querying", the subject of an article in the September 2008
edition of Capstone's eNewsletter) or put together a balanced scorecard initiative. If you need an experienced
application architect to help you with your reporting requirements, just let us know. Whatever your needs in building
BI applications or components, Capstone has the experience and expertise to help you make your project successful.
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