By Robert Stone, Senior Consultant
A beacon in the night. A BI Scorecard is just that. And more.
Your team works hard. You have meetings. You go to the trade shows. Yet your business intelligence is not driving the business as it should. It’s lagging and it’s telling you what the history of the business was—and not guiding the business to better decisions. After many years of development and a lot of investment, you have the same reports you had five years ago, just nicer looking. What you need is a beacon to guide you, a scorecard on your business intelligence environment that points you to key leverage points that may be limiting the flexibility of your business intelligence.
Awhile back, I was part of a team to do a BI Scorecard for an insurance company. Business was dissatisfied with the quality and agility of the business analysis reporting. IT was swamped with report requests and changes to the data warehouse and had little bandwidth to step back and take a fresh look at their BI environment. It’s the ol’ can’t see the forest for the trees adage. Nobody’s to blame, but it happens all the time and it often takes an outsider to see the root issues.
Business and IT both agreed to bring us in to interview business users and IT staff. We focused on six core areas and did a comprehensive set of interviews—plus we did an analysis of their documentation and reports to verify that what we were told matched their actions. In practice, Baseline’s BI Scorecard is all about measuring the right things in the real world—not what it should be if the world was perfect. That is why we take into account the maturity level of the organization and develop an action plan for moving forward that matches the client’s abilities.
In the end, we met with everyone involved to present our findings. These meetings are not meant to be a blame game; they’re a learning experience. Each person, at some point during the meeting, was surprised by the findings, but all were told often that they were doing a great job under the current conditions. We worked out a series of next steps and milestones with them. It was a win-win for business and IT, and a year later, they had reached a new level in their business intelligence reporting.
photo by Tony The Misfit via Flickr
Robert Stone has been with Baseline Consulting over 9 years and is a Managing Consultant responsible for leading and managing large and small projects. He has over 25 years of IT experience with a diverse knowledge and skill base, and he's focused his skills on using technology to empower business users in many industries.
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