Monday, November 14, 2011

Case Study for November 18th #BIWisdom TweetChat

Folks,

Peter Evans (@EvansBI) has provided the following case study for discussion this coming Friday at our #BIWisdom TweetChat.

Please review this case and come prepared to discuss!

Our thanks to Peter.

See you on Friday!

Best,

Howard
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Scenario:

Large International Retail Bank with Corporate BI System + Operational Systems + Externally generated survey reports and Operational Metrics. Having just been taken over by an external bank the Service Quality Team had a requirement to generate reports and a service quality scorecard to improve the business customer perception and profitability within the marketplace within a six month period.

You are hired specifically by the Business as opposed to the IT Department as there was already friction between the two teams due to past BI implantation failures – You are replacing a team of developers who had been brought in from the new banks IT Department for a three month period – and had left the unit with an Access database which had to be manually changed each month to the point of the non technical business users re-writing access queries and then running them to get each months reports – and the database was growing exponentially due to very poor data management.

Your problems are how to deal with an IT Team who thinks they are under threat not just from you but also the IT Department of the incoming bank. The Business unit employees were also very skeptical as they were made up of both analysts and managers and thought that if the process is automated they could lose their jobs, and finally since you are working for the business you have very little access to any IT infrastructure to make it all work.

As a BI Consultant/Developer what would be your approach.

2 comments:

  1. We all know the importance of tools, processes and people in the success of a BI project. I would consider this as another aspect of risk management. There are genenuine reservations of various types related to data security, user security, network security, etc that an IT team typically presents in a BI project
    The success of a BI project is always dependent upon the maturity of the processes and people involved. Therefore it becomes important from a people perspective to ensure that a balance is maintained. For a BI consultant going into a project is very imoortant to understand the current players and stakeholders as well as their current value in the organization.
    Understanding this value errosion of the current job roles is very important to help them get educated on perhaps how new opportunities from BI would make them even more valuable from the improved efficiencies. Our experience is to embedded the IT team members in our agile BI methodology and encourage ownership from IT.

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  2. I think I have some experience with this one. Should be a good conversation.

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