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January 26, 2009
Business Process for BI Practitioners - A Primer
Business Intelligence has a fairly wide scope but at the fundamental level it is all about "Business Processes". Let me explain a bit here.
BI, without the bells and whistles, is about understanding an organization's business model, its business processes and ultimately find the reason (analytics) and way to optimize the processes. The actions are carried out based on informed judgments (aided by BI), to make the organization better in whatever endeavor it has set itself to accomplish.
Assuming that BI practitioners are convinced that understanding business process is critical to their work, let me delve a bit into the basics of it.
1) What is a business process? (As a side note, one of the best explanation for business models is given by Joan Magretta in her book 'What Management Is')
Business processes are set of activities involved within or outside an organization that work together to produce a business outcome for a customer or to an organization. The fact is that for an organization to function, there are many outcomes that are required to happen on a daily basis.
2) What are BPM Tools?
Business Process Management (BPM) tools are used to create an application that is helpful in designing business process models, process flow models, data flow models, rules and also helpful in simulating, optimizing, monitoring and maintaining various processes that occur within an organization.
3) The Mechanics of Business Modeling
Business Process Modeling is the first step, followed by Process Flow Modeling and Data Flow diagrams. All these 3 diagrams and associated documentation will help in getting the complete picture of an organization's business processes. Brief explanation of these 3 types are given below:
a) In Business Process Modeling, an organization's functions are represented by using boxes and arrows. Boxes represent activities and arrows represent information associated with that activity. Input, Output, Control and Mechanism are the 4 types of arrows. A box and arrows combination that describes one activity is called a context diagram and obviously there would be many context diagrams to explain all the activities within the enterprise.
b) Process Flow Modeling is a model that is a collection of several activities of the business. IDEF3 is the process description capture method and this workflow model explains the activity dependencies, timing, branching and merging of process flows, choice, looping and parallelism in much greater detail.
c) Data Flow Diagrams (DFD) are used to capture the flow of data between various business processes. DFD's describe data sources, destinations, flows, data storage and transformations. DFDs contains five basic constructs namely: activities (processes), data flows, data stores, external references and physical resources.
Just like the data modeler goes thro' conceptual, logical and physical modeling steps, a business process modeler creates the Business Process Models, Process Flow Models and Data Flow Diagrams to get a feel for the business processes that take place within an enterprise.
Thoughts for BI Practitioners:
1. Consider viewing BI from the point of optimizing business processes
2. Might be worthwhile to learn about Business Process Modeling, Process Flow Modeling and Data Flow Diagrams
3. Understand the working of BPM tools and its usage in the enterprise BI landscape
4. Beware of the acronym BPM. BPM is Business Process Management but can also be peddled as Business Performance Management.
5. My view is that Performance Management is at a higher level, in the sense, that it is a collective (synergistic) view of the performance of individual business processes. A strong performance management framework can help you drill-down to specific business processes that can be optimized to increase performance.
Thanks for reading. Please do share your thoughts.
Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at 7:15 AM | Comments (3)
January 3, 2009
What is "Safe to Bet On" in Business Intelligence?
While the phrase "Safe to Bet On" is an oxymoron of sorts, it is that time of the year where we first look at the past, derive some insights and look forward to what the future has in store for us. I have no doubts that 2009 will be doubly interesting for BI practitioners as compared to 2008. Having said that, I decided to do a bit of introspection to figure out what skills (can also be read as competencies) should I be looking at to stay relevant in the Business Intelligence world far into the future, say at 2020. Hopefully that resonates with some of you.
Let me first try and get down to defining the skills required for Business Intelligence and Analytics. The trick here is to stay "high-level" as any BI person will acknowledge the fact that one we get down to look at the trees (rather than the forest), the sheer number of skills required for enterprise level BI can get daunting.
Taking inspiration from the fact that any business can be condensed into 2 basic functions, viz. Making & Selling, I propose that there are 3 key skills that make for successful BI. They are:
Skill 1 - Business Process Understanding: If you are a core industry expert and can still talk about multi-dimensional expressions, that's great! But most BI practitioners have their formative years rooted on the technology side and have implemented solutions across industries. The ability to understand the value-chain of any industry, map out business processes, identify optimization areas, translating IT benefits to business benefits are the key sub-skills in this area.
Skill 2 - Architecting BI Solutions: This skill is all about answering the question of "What is the blue-print" for building the Business Intelligence Landscape in the organization. Traditionally, we have built data warehouses & data marts either top-down or bottom-up, integrated data from multiple sources into physical repositories, modeled them dimensionally, provided adhoc query capability and we are done! - NOT ANYMORE. With ever increasing data volumes, real-time requirements imposed by Operational BI, increased sophistication for end-user analytics, the clamor for leveraging unstructured data on one hand and the advent of On-Demand Analytics, Data Mashups, Data Warehouse appliances, etc., there is no single best way to build a BI infrastructure. So the answer to "What is the blueprint?" is "It depends". It depends on many factors (some of which are known today and many which aren't) and the person / organization who appreciates these factors and finds the best fit to a particular situation is bound to succeed.
Skill 3 - BI Tools Expertise: Once a blue-print is defined and optimization areas identified, we need the tools that can turn those ideas into reality. BI practitioners have many tools at their disposal straddling the entire spectrum with excel spreadsheets at one end to high-end data mining tools at the other extreme. If you bring in the ETL & data modeling tools, the number of industry-strength tools gets into the 50s and beyond. With convergence of web technologies, XML, etc. into mainstream BI, it probably makes sense to simplify and say "Anything you imagine can be done with appropriate BI tools". "Appropriate" is the key word here and it takes good amount of experience (and some luck) to get it right.
In essence, my prescription for BI practitioners to stay relevant in 2020 is to be aware of developments on these 3 major areas, develop specific techniques / sub-skills for each one of them and more importantly respect & collaborate with the BI practitioner in the next cubicle (which translates to anywhere across the globe in this flat world) for he/she would bring in complementary strengths.
Thanks for reading. Wish you all a very happy new year 2009!
Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at 11:30 AM | Comments (2)
