New Business Requirements for BI: Part 1

By Fernando Martinez-Campos, Senior Consultant

 Business intelligence requirements gathering has long been an established process in the BI development lifecycle. However the process is changing. In our client work we’ve seen many approaches to business requirements definition. In my next three blog posts I will discuss one of these clients, and present a top-down case study of defining requirements, starting with the business needs for the Enterprise. Then we will explore other different perspectives of BI requirements gathering.

I have analyzed business requirements in many industries and found it difficult to devise a single, standard recipe of questions that could be applied universally across client situations. The best examples of successful requirements gathering tend to be with companies that have easily understood business processes that can be measured, tracked, and improved using BI. Using the example in these blog posts you can apply some general principles to your specific requirements analysis needs.

Before we start, let me explain the the so-called “top-down” approach to business requirements gathering. Top-down requirements analysis starts by looking at the overall business model. Then we proceed to break down the business model into flows, phases within the flow, and opportunities where BI will help improve the business. Top-down analysis has these benefits:

• It aligns top business priorities with BI projects (and vice versa).
• Executive management gets involved in solving business problems with analytics.
• It provides a high level roadmap of business initiatives and BI projects.

Top-down means considering a general business problem at the highest level of the enterprise, the “top”, and subdivide the analysis into more detail. This process ensures that the highest business priorities are addressed first. Then subsequent efforts refine those priorities into implementable projects. Top-down works best when there is a high-profile business initiative and a sense of urgency with executive management. This provides the impetus to fund projects that analyze these problems and implement BI solutions.

The top-down approach is not the only way of gathering requirements —we’ll discuss others in future blog posts.   

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Fernando Martinez-Campos is a senior consultant with Baseline Consulting and expert in data architecture, data interchange standards, legacy coexistence strategies, and reference architectures templates for infrastructure, applications and databases.

Comments

[Business Consultant]

I knew that there were some changes afoot but no one has been able to articulate them like you have here. Very succinct - thanks for the great resource!