We really like the idea of staggering a roll-out of BI capability within organisations.

From our point of view it enables some value to be (relatively) quickly delivered to the business, without them having to wait 1-2 years for the full blown solution.

However the concept of quick wins is very different to the concept of “best of breed” or “point solution” implementations.  We are vendor agnostic, so work with organisations who have IBM (Cognos), Microsoft, Oracle, SAS and SAP (BO), but we do believe an integrated platform provides ease of implementation and reduced ongoing administration compared to trying to integrate multiple disparate solutions.

To highlight the capabilities we think organisations should deploy as an integral part of their front-end Business Intelligence solution we utilise the following Reporting Maturity Model:

OptimalBI Reporting Maturity Model

  1. Fragmented Systems
    Source data for analysis is distributed over multiple system and the majority of users time is taken acquiring and validating data
  2. Consolidated Repository
    Data is available in a single trusted source, users spend their time developing reports in a variety of disparate adhoc tools such as Microsoft Office
  3. Production Reporting
    Users are able to access predefined reports, often parameter driven, which enables them to quickly and easily access detailed and summary information
  4. Data Exploration
    Multi-dimensional data and tools enable users to easily slice and dice information to manually explore data and gain insight
  5. Ad Hoc Analysis
    Analysts are able to access data from multiple trusted internal data sources and external data sources and perform what if and scenario based modeling
  6. Advanced Analytics
    Advanced data mining based capability enables analysts to automatically uncover hidden patterns based on large volumes of historical data

How many of these capabilites have you delivered to your organisaion?