Optimizing your BI organization and processes for trusted data discovery

Optimizing Your BI Organization and
Processes for Trusted Data Discovery
Timo Elliott
SAP

© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved. 1
Agenda
BICC Overview
What Changed?
Learning from Others
Recommendations
Wrap-up

2
Business Intelligence Competency Centers

What Is a BICC?
A Business Intelligence Competence Center (BICC)
is a cross-functional organizational team that has
defined tasks, responsibilities, roles, and skills
for supporting and promoting the effective use of
Business Intelligence across an organization
Note that Gartner says that “Competency Centers” have a bad reputation,
and now recommends “Business Analytics Team”…

Basic Goal: Make BI More Strategic and Cost Effective

BICCs Bring Big Benefits
Every winner of a BI Best Practice Award has a BICC
• (But beware of correlation and causation)
Survey conducted by BetterManagement.com, 2010
24%
26%
45%
45%
48%
74%
Decreased software costs
Decreased staff costs
Better understanding of the value of BI
Increased decision-making speed
Increased business user satisfaction
Increased usage of Business Intelligence
Organizations with a BICC see the following benefits:

BICC Key Skills
Source: Gartner

The Main Functions and Responsibilities of a BICC
Source: Capgemini BICC Study 2012i

Text
Functional Areas of the BICC
Business
Intelligence
Program
BI Delivery
Data
Stewardship
Training
Advanced
Analytics
Support
Vendor
Management
Data
Acquisition
Business Intelligence Competency Center
Executive
sponsor

BICC Recommendations
Creating a BICC
• Assess the current state, needs, and
opportunities
• Define the business value of a BICC to the
enterprise — specific business objectives and
the business case
• Figure out the top priorities for skills,
technologies, initiatives and governance
• Identify business sponsors to steer the BICC
and charter governance bodies

10
What Changed?
10© 2015 SAP SE or an SAP affiliate company. All rights reserved.

Analytics Is a Hot Topic
Big data is a big deal in big business
Business people now need to control it

User Empowerment Leads to New Organizational Stress
Consumerization of IT
Increased business frustration
Increased IT frustration
Employee-driven technology
Business-led budgets
Customer-facing needs
More external data Speed of change

Lots of New Techniques and Technologies to Manage
Businesses struggling to provide coherent approach
Source: Gartner

But BICCs Are Not Driving BI

The Majority of Data Users Need Isn’t in the System
“We found, on average, that 45% of the
data business people use resides outside
of the enterprise BI environments
An astonishingly miniscule 2% of
business decision makers reported
using solely enterprise BI applications
This is undoubtedly connected to 76% of
business respondents indicating they
continue to resort to spreadsheets and
other homegrown BI applications to
analyze BI data ”
Source: Forrester
45%
55%
In enterprise systems
Not in enterprise system

Enterprise Systems Are Too Slow

Enterprise BI: Too Little Data and Too Hard to Use

Business Users Do Not Fully Trust Enterprise Data

So Users Turn to Their Own Systems
40% are using an equal
amount or more of
homegrown applications

Basic Conflict
BI programs have struggled
to clearly define roles and
responsibilities between IT
and business users in a self-
service BI delivery model
Few BI programs have been
able to find a workable
balance between business
user empowerment and
governance with self-service
data discovery
Top-down
BICC
Bottom-up
Self-service
Trusted information
Efficient reuse
Too report-driven
Flexibility
Speed
Experimentation

Wikipedia
Local experts Encyclopedia
Britannica
Encarta
IT Seeing Same Disruption as Other “Digital Businesses”

(1) Scandinavian Consumer Manufacturing Co.
The company deployed a first Global BI solution around 2000 together with the first SAP
implementations
2000-2005 2005-2010 2011
No BI strategy
• No real BI strategy
• IT left to prioritize
• Multiple versions of
the truth
One truth
• Company
Performance model
• Standard reporting
• One truth
• Anchored in finance
Future vision
• Extend reporting to
more users
• Redefine role
• More end-user flexibility

A Change in User Profiles and Patterns
Over a period of 7 years the company saw several shifts in its BI user group
The shifts seem to happen with shorter and shorter intervals
• System Expert
• Favored Excel as front end
• Could live with poor
performance
• Primarily used data from
SAP
• General analyst
• Wanted to use web reports
as well
• Interested in data from
several sources
• Demanded better
performance
• Expecting BI self service
• Want’s information on
mobile devices
• Not scared of technology,
uses the right tool for the
job

Time to Find Out What Was Really Happening
With the help of external consultants the company ran a small three month
project to determine current vs. desired
• Did the team really understand the users and their needs?
• Was the reporting in the central system a true picture of overall reporting activity?
• Did management have an accurate overview of reporting activities?
• How should the team involve management in prioritizing and setting strategic
directions?
• Was the team perceived as a help or a bottleneck?
• Where could the team really make a difference?
• What were the new requirements in terms of speed, flexibility and simulation?
“I can recommend this exercise. I know a lot of departments who work with BI
think they know their users, what they’re doing, and what they’re needs are – but
unless you’ve done a real investigation of this, I would challenge you that you will
find stuff you didn’t know existed.”
BI Manager, Scandinavian Manufacturing Company

Getting the Facts Straight
The project was an eye-opener for the management team. The main findings were:
Tools
More user-
friendly tools
Need a wider
variety of tools
Data
Data is too
hard to
understand
Need access to
non ERP data
in reporting
Flexibility
Need to be
able to create
own reports
Standard
reports have
limited value
Ownership
Some had
invested in own
systems
All preferred to
be in a global
system

Acting on the Results
BI Self-Service Approach
More responsibility to end users
More user-friendly tools
Visual discovery
Training required
Business and analytics skills
“Doing visualization is really cool … but if you apply the wrong graphs to the data
you will not get a very good result … Some of my employees have had to actually
take a course in visualization, just to be able to challenge the business.”
BI Manager, Scandinavian Manufacturing Company

(2) European Consumer Goods Packaging Company
Had Created the “Perfect Giant” of Enterprise BI
Business Intelligence was:
• Standardized
• Repeatable
• Clearly understood across the company
Regular, well-communicated releases
• Jointly agreed between Business and IT
• Facilitates the business areas planning and
scheduling of report requests
A steering group of senior management
• Majority business leaders with strong
representation from IT
Clear measurements to follow up performance
• Usage and user feedback

“Past Achievements Don’t Guarantee Future Success”
Time to information
Business case required to get new reports, and could take six months. Business
movers ended up buying their own tools.
Multiple iterations
Multiple iterations required, communications degrading. Local BI teams able to be
more consultative and collaborative.
Lack of accountability
Some things that should have been done locally were being delegated to central IT.
Gut-based decision making was taking over.
Good: Agility, happier business users
Bad: Higher costs, no holistic view, no economy of scale, fragmented BI tool
landscape, lost business opportunities from not having a global view

Making It Agile
How to make an Ocean Liner perform as a
Speedboat?
Moving to an agile strategy
Learn from the business. BI is something that
brings up emotions. Found a lot of good practice in
the business as well as bad.
The unofficial BI was more agile and more cost-
efficient: Creating the reports close to the action,
leaner process, no handovers, more niche tools
that met their requirements.
Had to find a new balance between control and
autonomy/freedom.

Decentralization of Reporting
Data warehouse centralized, but all report development local
Agile development
Cost effective
Business driven

Redefinition of Roles, Processes, and Tools
Development close to the business
Knows Business/Analytics/IT
Report Developer
Prototyping
Business-driven
Secure, strong BI governance
Intuitive
Fast development
Cover all analytic needs
BI Expert
Agile BI
Up-to-date suite of
tools + pragmatic
exceptions
New Role
New
Process
New Tools
Need Solution

What Changed
Before: “The” BI process
Now three levels, self-serve, agile BI, IT/cross-platform
Getting the BI experts: Looked for best fit, then trained
Some areas didn’t feel they had the competences
“Hypercare” handholding on first reports
First report more expensive, but now just a few days instead of four to five weeks —
after six months, saving of 40% in the development time
New four-step process
Initiate, mock up, finalize, industrialize — two-week cycles
Corporate “Wikipedia” for documentation
Guide towards solutions rather than “tools”

(3) Large UK Retailer
Situation
Beloved UK institution but “beleaguered”
Top-to-bottom control of products
Lots of information silos, tools
Lots of “institutional knowledge”
Change Ahead
Needed omni-channel approach/“products”
Required new integrated, business-focused analytics approach
New executive team and “digital native” IT

Launched New Analytics Approach
Big kick-off meeting
Analysts, IT, execs, outside experts
All areas of the business
Tool independent
Launched new “service bureau” approach
Strong executive support
Analytics driven locally, best-practice shared centrally
“Own the problem, not the solution” (“Can we access this tool, please?”)
Collection of “agile services”
Community-driven, using internal social networking

Decision Pods
Fully interactive,
data-based screens
Questions answered
there and then, no
leaving the meeting
until a decision is
made
Based on the
experiences of a
large US retailer

It’s All About the Relationship
Instead of a scenario in which Business
and IT play separate, traditional provider-
versus-user roles everybody has to
combine efforts to jointly explore and learn
— and everybody has to compromise!
Learn from the business — there is a lot of
good practice that should be adopted

Build and Nurture a Community
Regular face-to-face meetings
• Bring people together across silos: IT, Analysts, Business Leaders, Execs
• Presentations of successes best practices
• Invite external speakers
Virtual communities
• Leverage internal social tools for people to share information
• Community-driven BI content
Community self-policing
• Act as BICC eyes and ears to discover projects,
opportunities
• Social mechanisms to ensure the “right behaviors”
Ensure support at all levels
• Not just executives — middle and users

Move to Agile BI
Forrester, 2014: Agile BI is an
approach that combines
processes, methodologies,
organizational structure, tools, and
technologies that enable strategic,
tactical, and operational decision-
makers to be more flexible and
more responsive to the fast pace
of customer, business, and
regulatory requirements changes.
• If your enterprise BI isn’t agile, unofficial BI platforms will grow like
mushrooms in the dark
• A fragmented BI tool strategy will add cost and jeopardize the holistic view
of BI
• Report development is highly iterative — traditional IT development
processes don’t work

Inspiration from the “Agile Manifesto”
The highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery of
analytics
Welcome changing requirements, even late in
development. Agile processes harness change
for competitive advantage.
Deliver working projects frequently, from a
couple of weeks to a couple of months, with a
preference to the shorter timescale
Business people and analytics staff must work
together daily throughout the project
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they
need, and trust them to get the job done.
The most efficient and effective method of
conveying information to and within a
development team is face-to-face conversation
Delivered, used analytics is the primary measure
of progress
Agile processes promote sustainable
development. The sponsors, developers and
users should be able to maintain a constant pace
indefinitely.
Continuous attention to technical excellence and
good design enhances agility
Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of
work not done — is essential
The best architectures, requirements and
designs emerge from self-organizing teams
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to
become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly
Adapted from: http://agilemanifesto.org/

Reorganize and Refocus
Avoid “worst of both worlds” approach!
Move to federated approach
• From “gatekeeper” to “air traffic controller”
• Bring “shadow BI” under umbrella of BICC — but retaining local links
• Co-locate “central” staff in business units whenever possible
Invest in appropriate tools and skills
• Broad, not deep — build competence in “turning business information into
insight” rather than technology, i.e., less reporting, more exploration
• Stay current! Be two years ahead of the business instead of two years behind. It
will take time to build BI experts — start now.
“Agency” philosophy
• Be the best available option for the business — leverage unique knowledge of
cross-functional opportunities

Offer Key Services
Data Bureau
One-stop shopping for data, internal, external, or “wrangled”
Tools Bureau
Expert recommendations of best technologies to use, when
Sandbox Environments
Environments that let business experiment on their own
Innovation Opportunities
Workshops (e.g., Design Thinking) to uncover new opportunities
Analysis Validation
Trust, but verify …

Introduce Data Driving Licenses
Source: Gartner

Support the BI Lifecycle
Source: Gartner

Remember to Communicate!
Effective communication is the bedrock of a successful BICC
Involves skills that aren’t always part of the staff hiring process
Sell the sizzle
Use dashboards, scorecards, maps and other visual applications/tools
Analytics is “white hot,” so sell it
Celebrate success
Pick a first initiative and make it a business success
Identify evangelists from the initiative and have them sell the success

Where to Find More Information
Barc Collective Insight white paper
SAP BICC Playlist on YouTube: Link
SAP BI Self Assessment: www.sap.com/bistrategy
SAP BI Strategy Playlist on YouTube: Link
BI News: www.sap.com/BINews
Blogs on BI Strategy
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-30479
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-30480
http://scn.sap.com/community/business-intelligence/blog/2012/12/07/bi-
strategy-bicc-a-key-element-to-your-bi-program
http://scn.sap.com/community/business-intelligence/blog/2012/11/07/bi-
strategy-bi-competency-centers-take-center-stage-again
http://blogs.sap.com/analytics/2013/03/27/driving-value-from-your-business-
intelligence-program-define-track-and-measure-success/

7 Key Points to Take Home
1. Old approaches are no longer enough
2. Self-service BI is a wonderful business opportunity
If done right, can dramatically improve business agility and IT/Business alignment
3. But it requires new cultures and ways of working
You’re no longer in charge — and everybody has to compromise
4. Provide what the business needs, not necessarily what they want
Service-oriented approach, but the “customer is not always right”
5. Community is the essential pillar
No one person or team can do this alone — build momentum and listen to feedback
6. Look for opportunities to simplify
It’s not about technology, but the right technology can help agility
7. Keep up momentum and success
Look out for teaching opportunities, and market success widely and often

50
Thank you!
Timo Elliott, SAP
timo.elliott@sap.com
Twitter: @timoelliott
Blog: timoelliott.com

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