SQL and Business Intelligence Understanding and Establishing

Business Value

Bridging the gap between business and technology

Agenda

1. Introduction

2. What this session is not

3. Understanding Business Value

4. Purpose of a Business Case

5. Business Case components

6. Data Business Challenges and the Future

7. Digital Transformation

About Me

• Varied background and career

• 12 years US Naval Service (Chief Petty Officer)

• BS Allied Health

• MA Counseling

• 7 years Probation / corrections

• Started working in technology in the Navy and through my corrections career

• 12 Years CIO experience in mid market / mid size company

• Broad and deep technical background

• Multiple IT and technology certifications across multiple technology areas and stacks

• Much more BS

• 10 years as a Business Solutions consultant

3

What this session is NOT

• How to

• Deep technical dive

• Technical demo

• SQL technical capabilities

• What’s New etc.

• Sales pitch

4

What this session IS

• Business focused

• Business problem focused

• Business driver focused

• Business pain and requirement focused

• Objective is to help IT / technology folks effectively bridge the gap between business and technology!

5

Questions

• How many of you are IT team, staff or leadership?

• How many of you are business?

• How many are more of a hybrid?

Questions

• Who has worked to budget for a SQL implementation?

• How many of your organizations have a specific business case model that you use?

• For what business solutions are you using SQL?

• What is the value of a business case?

Establishing Business Value

Establishing Business Value - Terms

• Business Drivers

• Business Problem

• Business Case

• Business Value

• Business Benefits

Business Drivers

• Whether managers plan to implement new-business processes or specify new technology, a proposed change in operations often involves a financial investment, forcing managers to make an effective business case that justifies the change. To make the case, managers must understand business drivers the change must support.

• Simply put, it is critical to show the way the proposed change will better align the organization with its mission. It must show the way this proposed project’s measurable benefits will outweigh potential risks. Managers should consider the primary business drivers. One major global facilities organization identified its top five business drivers as:

Business Drivers• elevate the level of consistency and quality of services across the entire

portfolio and automate standardized business processes by using enabling technology

• shift time spent on labor-intensive activities to higher value-add activities

• achieve data transparency to allow visibility and timely access to data at all levels of the organization

• leverage technology as a resource to scale for increasing client demands, while reducing the cost of providing those services

• support professional staff by freeing up their time for core activities, aid in career growth, and make the collective institutional knowledge available for the entire organization.

Business ProblemWell-defined problems lead to breakthrough solutions. When developing new products, processes, or even businesses, most companies aren’t sufficiently rigorous in defining the problems they’re attempting to solve and articulating why those issues are important. Without that rigor, organizations miss opportunities, waste resources, and end up pursuing innovation initiatives that aren’t aligned with their strategies. How many times have you seen a project go down one path only to realize in hindsight that it should have gone down another? How many times have you seen an innovation program deliver a seemingly breakthrough result only to find that it can’t be implemented or it addresses the wrong problem? Many organizations need to become better at asking the right questions so that they tackle the right problems.

Harvard Business Review

Business Benefits

A business benefit can be defined as an outcome of an action or decision that contributes towards meeting one or more business objectives.

What is a Business Case

• A business case captures the reasoning for initiating a project or task. It is often presented in a well-structured written document, but may also sometimes come in the form of a short verbal argument or presentation.

• The logic of the business case is that, whenever resources such as money or effort are consumed, they should be in support of a specific business need

Why Use a Business Case

You’ve got a great idea for a new product that will increase revenue or a new system that will cut the company’s costs. But how can you be sure that it’s a worthwhile investment? Any time you propose a capital expenditure, you can be sure senior leaders will want to know what the return on investment (ROI) is. There are a variety of methods you can use to calculate ROI — net present value, payback, breakeven — and internal rate of return, or IRR.

Why use a Business Case?

• SQL Server like every business technology is an investment

• Before making an investment you should always know your expected return

• Business Case Formulas (will not go into these in detail):

• Net Present Value (NPV)

• Return on Investment (ROI)

• Rate of Return (ROR)

• Internal Rate of Return (IRR)

• Cost Benefit Analysis

Why use a Business Case

• Focus requirements/scope on capabilities that will deliver Value

• Useful for managing scope change

• Beginning of the Organization Change Management Process – Ensure Users will use the system

• Level of Precision

• Depends on Maturity of the Plan

• Organization Culture – what is your culture?

• Make and document assumptions

Business Case Components

• Basic Components • Costs,

• Benefits,

• Risk,

• Time

• People tend to focus on Costs

It Starts at Measurable Pain

• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are measurable pains

• Pains have no quantitative value if they cannot be measured

Missed Deadlines

Overflowing Pipeline

Insufficient Staff

Competition

Budget Constraints

Revenue

Employee Utilization

Customer Retention

Number of Customers

Poor Cash Flow

KPIsCommon Reasons For Pain

Cost Analysis: Best Practices• Group costs into buckets

• For example, desktop and server solutions usually have different cost buckets

• The key to effective costing is identifying the time spent on each activity - Work Breakdown Structure

• Recognize costs that should not be included in analysis

• Costs that would be incurred anyway

• e.g.., normal hardware refresh

• Costs not directly related to the project

• e.g., additional system changes

• Costs already incurred (sunk costs)

• e.g., operating system upgrades already completed

• Be sure to include all components

• Always perform “what-if” analysis

• Like benefits, get buy-in to defend numbers before presenting business value study

Business Process Value Modeling• Study one process at a time – Survey to understand best opportunities

• Prerequisite: Work directly with the end user

• Physically map business process metrics to get buy-in for process change

• Business managers are the source for pains and benefit equation variables

• Pain/KPI discussion drives business value versus productivity

• Keep equations simple

• Estimate process change metrics and then present them for approval if you can’t get the numbers you need• Get buy-in to defend numbers before presenting

How are you using SQL Server?

The business doesn’t care about SQL. They care about the capabilities and the benefits to the business that SQL provides.

• Integration services

• Master data management

• High availability

• Data integrity

• Reporting and analytics

• KPIs and metrics

SQL Business Scenarios

• Enterprise reporting

• KPIs and metrics

• Financial reporting

• End user reports

• Sales reporting

• Point of sale analysis

• Production metrics

• Customer satisfaction

• Customer engagement

• Marketing metrics

The Business Challenges

Data - Then

• Easy to forget how far we have come• The first computers most of us worked with had memory measured in

Kilobytes, and had no hard drives

• Most data captured was from accounting software, and didn’t add up even to gigabytes

• Green bar reports and VisiCalc were state of the art…

Business Challenges – Data Deluge

Data - Now

• New challenges have arisen• Data is captured across most systems in an enterprise,

producing Petabytes of new raw data annually

• Integration across multiple source systems, is expected

• Access is expected to be instantaneous

• Data reliability and quality are critical

• Big data leading to huge influxes of data

• IOT is transforming the data landscape

• And many more…

The Business Priority

• Consolidate information from data spread across the enterprise

• Manage data governance and quality based on business knowledge

• Make faster, better business decisions based on trusted data

“Exploiting business data and information is a nearly universal priority for organizations.”

– Gartner

The Need for Credible, Consistent Data

A telecommunications firm lost $8 million a month because data entry errors incorrectly coded accounts, preventing bills from

being sent out

A global chemical company discovered it was losing millions of

dollars in volume discounts in procuring supplies because it

could not correctly identify and reconcile suppliers on a global

basis

An insurance company lost hundreds of thousands of dollars

annually in mailing costs (postage, returns, collateral, and staff to

process returns) due to duplicate customer records

An information services firm lost $500,000 annually and alienated customers because it repeatedly

recalled reports sent to subscribers due to inaccurate data

A large bank discovered that 62% of its home equity loans were

being calculated incorrectly, with the principal getting larger each

month

A health insurance company in the Midwest delayed a decision

support system for two years because the quality of its data was

“suspect”

Business Decisions

Incorrect or Incomplete

Data

Credible, consistent

DataBusiness Decisions

Business Challenges – Data Silos

• Data is typically stored in multiple applications, documents, and systems

• Each application is used in isolation

• Information about a single business entity can be difficult to:• Correlate

• Consolidate

• De-duplicate

Business Challenges – Data Governance

• Data representations of business entities must be standardized and reconciled across systems

• Data records must meet requirements for:

• Accuracy

• Completeness

• Consistency

• Compliance

• Data infrastructure is managed by IT, but business users have the necessary knowledge to manage its governance

Contributing factors

• Relentless advancements in technology• Storage density

• Memory capacity

• Processing speed• Improved 55% per year from 1986 - 2000

• Every decreasing costs per unit for CPU capacity, memory and storage

• Ever increasing application of data capture for all kinds of business and industrial proceses

Contributing Factors

• For every increase in CPU, Memory and storage capacity, software vendors will introduce features to consume it.

• Some useful, some inane…

• And some insanely Great!• Analysis Services

• SharePoint

• Excel/PowerPivot

What is next?• Even larger data volumes• Need to incorporate unstructured and external sources of data

• Geo-sensitive applications and analysis

• Integrate with cloud storage and services –• “Mash-up” applications

• Self-Service BI

• Power BI

• “Agile” BI

• IOT

• Machine Learning

• Streaming Analytics

What to expect?• Greater need than ever for data quality

• Data has to be trusted to be used effectively

• End-user capabilities cannot be ignored• X64 platforms, dual quad-core CPU’s, Gigabytes of Memory,

and no-where to go…

• Greater need for access to data

• More Alerts/event trigger notifications

• Open sources of data being standardized• ODATA standard, REST, ATOM data feeds

• Greater reliance on Network performance

• Cloud, cloud and more cloud

IoT

Sleep tracking

COMMUTE COMMUTE

Home security Home automation Leak detection

Smart appliances

Indoor navigation

Health monitoring

Smart lighting

Pet tracking

Information capture

Trip tracking and car health

Control

Child and elder

monitoring

Sports

and fitness

Air conditioning and temperature control Environmental sensors

Behavior modification

Garden, lawn and plant care

Food and nutrition tracking

Beacons and proximity

New devices and sensors

Object tracking

Identity Smart vending machines

Medication adherence

Bike ride stats and protection

Entertainment systems

Office equipment

HOME HOMEWORKPLACE

How do we get there from here?

• Provide a secure, stable platform for Information delivery

• Ensure data integrity and quality across all operational and reporting systems

• Empower analysts to produce out-of the box

• Enable business users to create compelling and useful ad hoc reports

• Leverage the cloud

Gartner Quadrant for BI Platforms

Gartner Quadrant for BI Platforms• Microsoft's cloud-based delivery model and low per-user pricing offers a low TCO — one of the top three reasons

why customers selected it, in addition to ease of use for business users and the availability of skilled resources. While Microsoft has long offered low per-user pricing, customers are advised to consider the TCO, which includes hardware costs, development and support costs. Previously, Microsoft had a high cost of ownership in its on-premises deployment model (despite low licensing costs), because of the complexity of implementing multiple servers. The new Power BI addresses this issue with both a streamlined workflow for content authors and because the hardware and server architecture is in the Microsoft Azure cloud.

• Microsoft ranks in the top quartile for achievement of business benefits, with high scores in its use for monetizing data, improving customer service and increasing revenue, as well as delivering better insights to more users. As customers move to business-user-led deployments, an emphasis on the achievement of business benefits at a lower cost has driven much of the net new BI and analytics buying — in lieu of centrally provisioned, IT-authored reporting platforms.

• Microsoft was ranked in the top quartile of Magic Quadrant vendors for user enablement (only Tableau ranked slightly higher), with high scores for online tutorials, community support, conferences and documentation. The high enablement scores also contributed to Microsoft's ranking in the top quartile for product success.

• Microsoft has continued to expand the number and variety of data sources it supports natively and has also improved its partner network to build out connectors and content that includes prebuilt reports and dashboards. For example, Microsoft now has prebuilt connectors (and content) to Facebook, Salesforce, Dynamics CRM, Google Analytics, Zendesk and Marketo, to name a few.

Questions?

Bridging the gap between business and technology

Contact Me

mbowers@mailctp.com

618-972-2152

https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthew-bowers-ab8a932

https://www.facebook.com/matthew.w.bowers.1

@mbowersmailctp