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Douglas Briggs
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Managing a Heterogeneous BI Landscape
Douglas R. Briggs Director, Business Intelligence Washington University in St. Louis
Who am I?
• Education: – BA, Williams College (go Ephs!) – MS, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Business: – Director of Business Intelligence at Washington University – 14+ years at Anheuser-Busch Inbev, managing BI and Data
Warehouse support, development, and architecture – Managing Editor of Data Hub Australia (
http://datatalent.com.au/datahub-australia)
– Advise companies throughout the Midwest on BI & DW matters
The place I love to work • Washington University is:
– Not The University of Washington – Not George Washington University
• Washington University in St. Louis is (US News & World Report 2014 rankings): – #14 National University – #22 Best (Graduate) Business School – #18 Best Law Schools – #6 Best Medical Schools: Research – #5 Best Graduate School: Genetics/Genomics – #3 Best Graduate School: Physical Therapy – #2 Best Graduate School: Occupational Therapy – #1 Best Graduate School: Social Work
• Our mission: – Washington University’s mission is to discover and disseminate knowledge, and protect the
freedom of inquiry through research, teaching, and learning.
… but enough about me, let’s talk about data …
Background and Ancient History
• BI used to be done “inside the house” • As cloud became more viable, more vendors supporting it,
more stuff went into the cloud, including BI! • Some companies rushed into the cloud, resulting in – Failure to deliver ROI – Failure to satisfy user expectations – Failure to “play nicely” with IT’s other systems
• Cloud got a tarnished reputation, BI seen as risky for moving “out of the house”
• Now, confusion!
Current State
• Companies charting a course that accomplishes three goals: – Plan: create a roadmap to a destination that is reachable given
the company’s culture, resources, and landscape – Deliver: provide safe and robust service where it’s needed – Earn: Maximize ROI
• How do we do this? We need to know: where is BI now, and where is it going?
A Map of BI Tools & Uses
Mining & Exploration
Big Data
Dashboards Ad-hoc
Reporting &
Analysis OLAP &
OLTP Excel-based Reporting &
Analysis
Presentation Quality/"Pixel-
Perfect" Reporting
Narrower Wider
More General
Questions
More Focused
Questions
Deployment Footprint
The Natural Partition
• Enterprise-wide reporting solutions: – High-quality presentation – Standardized, repeatable processes
• Department-wide reporting – Intermediate-scope business questions – Multiple delivery channels – Parameterization, customized look & feel
• Specialized data tools – Data mining, powerful analytics, data discovery – Used by enclaves of power users who know the data intimately
Implications
• Vastly different tools for different audiences!
• Single tools can be unsuitable for use across the segments
• You can refocus your landscape on best-in-class solutions for each segment
• Some vendors have multiple products in their suite that can work in each segment, but don’t discount niche players focused on specialized needs
Your Challenge
• Remember your goals: – Create the viable roadmap that gets you from here to there – Deliver the goods – Make it pay for itself
• You need the appropriate segmentation between components that provide the best facility and agility – Facility = effective feature-set given your institutional needs – Agility = robust, extensible solution that meets present and future
needs
Goals for delivery: safe, robust, accessible
• Safety means all of these things (and more): – Regulatory compliance – Data & information protection (including models & algorithms) – Business process resumption & disaster recovery
• Data governance can help facilitate this • Credibility is the first casualty if it’s inconsistent or
unscalable • Delivery at the user-interaction endpoint is tailored
Managing the Transformation - Technology
• Rip-out & Replace: – Focus change and time-box the impact – Costly, and highest risk for “institutional inertia” to cause delays &
overruns
• Phased: – Minimize risk and pivot quickly – Landscape is constantly in flux – Requires thoughtful landscape architecture & effective
communication to foster credibility!
Managing the Transformation - Organizational
• Roles: – Development & support teams – May require changes to staff, retraining, or reorganization of
leadership
• Processes: – Governance, architecture, & business alignment – Grow it over time, especially if you’re phasing in BI components – Vendors & integration partners are excellent resources for best-
practices
Make it Earn its Keep
• Find your partners and advocates
• Select targeted opportunities: – Short ROI horizons – Cheap investments with outsized returns
• Handcuff the organization to the results – Nothing motivates like skin in the game – Vendors too!
Strategies
• Decouple segment-based solutions from each other
• Leverage SaaS paradigms selectively
• Allows departments to build effective point-solutions
• Your landscape will (probably) become heterogeneous organically – that’s okay.
Change is coming …
The vendor offering landscape is (once again) gravitating toward consolidated solutions
• OLAP à OLTP • Increasingly sophisticated, presentation-style graphics to
merge traditional dashboards and pixel-perfect reporting • Hardware acceleration and advanced storage & retrieval is
allowing traditional data discovery and exploration tools to encroach into the Big Data space
Your next steps
• Understand alignment between your current landscape and the segmentation map – Talk to your BI architects, they will show you the fit/gap – Close gaps with effective tool choices & process changes
• Develop the strategic plan, but … • Make sure you seed the path (especially in the beginning)
with the projects that meet your goals: – Part of a feasible plan – Deliver the goods – Pay for themselves
Take-aways
• Natural user & use-case partition à landscape segmentation
• Best-in-class is a more effective strategy than it’s been for the past several years
• Expect some solutions to migrate to SaaS organically
• Expect tool consolidation to muddy the waters
Questions?
(I have some answers)
Please keep in touch!
• My interests and specialties: – BI competency centers – Data governance – BI change management
• Contact: – [email protected] – www.linkedin.com/douglasrbriggs
Thank you and good luck!
Thank you and good luck!
Thank you and good luck!