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August 15, 2009
Business Intelligence X-Ray - Calibrating Your BI Infrastructure: Part 2
In my last post, I introduced the concept of a BI X-Ray that helps assess & calibrate the state of the current BI landscape within the organization. First part of the BI X-Ray is on Business Profiling, which was already discussed. The second part involves an evaluation of the BI technology components and at Hexaware (the company I work for), we call it the 10 Point Framework.
10 Point Framework looks at the BI technology infrastructure from ten different dimensions and provides a set of recommendations for each of the areas. The coverage is as tabulated below:
1. Reporting and Delivery
a) Determine user groups and reporting requirements
b) Study the challenges involved in delivery mechanism
c) Identify the security requirements for reports
d) Identify the performance and frequency requirements
2. Data Integration
a) Study the current data integration process
b) Analyze the existing tools used for data extraction
c) Understand the Error handling and auditing process
3. Data Sources
a) Understand various sources of data
b) Analyze the source system data
c) Understand source system dependency, feed layout, frequency and mechanism of data transfer
d) Understand the change data capture process
4. Data Quality
a) Audit current databases
b) Study the accuracy of data
5. Enteprise Data Model
a) Study the existing conceptual, logical and physical data models
b) Study the entity relationships
6. Reference Data Strucuture
a) Understand existing system process and data flow
b) Study the existing data architecture
7. Security Framework
a) Study the existing data security
8. Metadata Availability
a) Study the existing metadata
b) Study the metadata capture process
9. Standards & Process
a) Study existing business process and problems
b) Study the current information flow
c) Analyze existing business requirements
10. Infrastructure
a) Study the current IT Infrastructure
b) Study the existing applications
c) Review the existing ETL tools
d) Review current BI Architecture
The following are key highlights of Ten Point Framework:
1) Covers all aspects of application process, technology, requirements and infrastructure
2) Helps in prioritizing and bucketing the requirements
3) Identifies critical positives and negatives
4) Evaluates against industry best practices
5) Provides a roadmap and recommendation
Hexaware delivers the Ten Point Framework as a consulting engagement spanning 6-8 weeks with distinct Understand, Analyze and Recommend phases
Once the Business Profiling and 10 Point assessment is completed, the organization has a pretty good handle on their current BI environment which is the starting point for newer initiatives.
Thanks for reading. Please do share your thoughts
Posted by Karthikeyan Sankaran at August 15, 2009 12:30 PM
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