Tuesday, August 10, 2010

It's quiet on the blog but not back at base..

Well it has been a bit longer than I had planned it to be since my last blog.  I've been buried deep at work on planning and defining all the activities needed to re-engineer a North American wide reporting solution: from project management, to planning for new business analysis, to envisaging the final customer experience of the system.  Why am I doing it all?  Well as is life in this economic climate we have few resources dedicated to an overly ambitious project.  C'est la vie.

In addition to this I have been reading up a lot on business analysis best practices and how they relate to business intelligence and also on methods for improving meta data management.  It's been a lot to take in.  The upshot of all this is that I have been thinking about the management aspects of business intelligence projects.  How perhaps they can be organized and how the business and information groups can and should interact to pull a project forward.

I said project.  Is BI a project?  Well not really.  As I briefly mentioned in my hello blog, BI is an evolving entity within an organization.  At best you can describe it as a program that manages individual projects that are all working towards the overall strategic program goal.  You do have a program strategy, don't you?  Therein lies the rub, what BI needs to be and what senior management want's it to be are often disconnected.  BI needs to be a continuous program, management likes it to be contained within a single project with a start and end date.  Overcoming this disconnect is something to be explored at a later date.

Alas I have much to do so that is all for today.  Next post I will explore organization and the roles and traits needed to be successful in BI.

No comments:

Post a Comment