Business Intelligence Roadmap

Coming up with a business intelligence (BI) initiative is one of the most challenging endeavors a business has to face. This is because new technologies have to be taken into consideration, more tasks have to be performed, responsibilities and roles have to be changed, and applications need to be delivered promptly without compromising on quality. A new methodology is required therefore an organization needs to have a well laid out business intelligence roadmap. There are various stages that an organization has to go through to come up with the right roadmap. These stages include justification, planning, business analysis, design, construction, and deployment.

The justification stage in the business intelligence platform roadmap refers to the assessment of the business problem or opportunity that will give rise to an engineering project. During the planning stage, a tactical and strategic business intelligence project plan is created to determine how the project will be achieved (there are also business intelligence operations that need to be carried out). The business analysis stage involves a comprehensive analysis of the opportunity or problem. This provides a greater understanding of the requirements that need to be met to come up with a solution. During the design project, the product is designed and this either solves the problem or takes advantage of the opportunity. In the construction stage, the product that was designed is created and expected to offer a return on the investment made within a specified period of time. The deployment stage involves implementing or selling the finished product. The effectiveness of the product is also measured at this stage to determine if the solution fails, meets or exceeds the expected returns on the investment made.

There are various approaches that are used to come up with BI strategies. One of the approaches used is old single-swim-lane development approach. In this approach, the business intelligence environment is supposed to be include cross-organizational decisions therefore the practices used by the organization in the past are considered to be inappropriate. The systems used in the past had a starting point and end and each one had specific users in the line of business. This means that cross-organizational activities were not considered to be effective in solving problems in a particular business line. These activities were blamed for the slow pace when projects were being carried out. For a line of business that is not integrated, this approach is sufficient because it provides adequate guidance during the implementation, planning and building process. The approach focuses on project planning, designing, coding and maintenance.

BI Roadmaps

Another approach which can be applied for a Microsoft BI roadmap is the new cross-organizational development approach. This approach refers to integrating information, information integrity, streamlined business processes and seamless functionality of the business. One of the initiatives that demonstrate this clearly is customer relationship management. For cross-organizational integration to take place, the business intelligence architecture needs to include technical and nontechnical infrastructure and enterprise-wide architecture. These are considered to be core competencies.

The roadmap offers a flexible framework for the projects. This means that it is possible for an organization to begin the project at any stage in the development process as long as it meets certain requirements. The roadmap will also promote parallel tracks of development to make it possible for multiple steps to be taken simultaneously. This means that multiple activities in the various stages can also take place simultaneously. The roadmap is both adaptive and agile and this makes it possible to manage and organize the project as parallel sub projects and each one of them can go through various iterations without affecting the rest.

A BI application cannot work if it does not have a set of well planned and executed activities. The BI environment usually evolves and becomes complicated with time and this is why you need to have a solid foundation to support the BI portals and any expansion plans that an organization would like to implement. To come up with a solid foundation, there are various tasks and business intelligence concepts that need to be considered. If the plan is constructed in a casual manner, the entire investment that the company has put in will be at risk.

The most important thing that an organization needs to think about is not whether it requires a methodology but the kind of methodology that is required and how it is going to be used to achieve the desired results. When determining the roadmap, staffing and skills also need to be taken into consideration. The organization should identify members who will be assigned particular roles for the SAP BI roadmap. In some cases, the staff may require training before the project begins. If an individual is assigned to manage the business intelligence roadmap, it is essential to determine whether the role will be a full-time one or if they will have other responsibilities within the organization.