Question

Assess the six stages of BI application development and evaluate the primary activity of each.

Answer 1

BI projects are organized according to the same six stages common to every engineering project. Within each engineering stage, certain steps are carried out to see the engineering project through to its completion. Business Intelligence Roadmap describes 16 development steps within these stages, as outlined below.

The Justification Stage

Step 1: Business Case Assessment

The business problem or business opportunity is defined and a BI solution is proposed. Each BI application release should be cost-justified and should clearly define the benefits of either solving a business problem or taking advantage of a business opportunity.

The Planning Stage

Step 2: Enterprise Infrastructure Evaluation

Since BI applications are cross-organizational initiatives, an enterprise infrastructure must be created to support them. Some infrastructure components may already be in place before the first BI project is launched. Other infrastructure components may have to be developed over time as part of the BI projects. An enterprise infrastructure has two components :

Technical infrastructure, which includes hardware, software, middleware, database management systems, operating systems, network components, meta data repositories, utilities, and so on.

Nontechnical infrastructure, which includes meta data standards, data-naming standards, the enterprise logical data model (evolving), methodologies, guidelines, testing procedures, change-control processes, procedures for issues management and dispute resolution, and so on.

Step 3: Project Planning

BI decision-support projects are extremely dynamic. Changes to scope, staff, budget, technology, business representatives, and sponsors can severely impact the success of a project. Therefore, project planning must be detailed, and actual progress must be closely watched and reported .

The Business Analysis Stage

Step 4: Project Requirements Definition

Managing project scope is one of the most difficult tasks on BI decision-support projects. The desire to have everything instantly is difficult to curtail, but curtailing that desire is one of the most important aspects of negotiating the requirements for each deliverable . Project teams should expect these requirements to change throughout the development cycle as the business people learn more about the possibilities and the limitations of BI technology during the project.

Step 5: Data Analysis

The biggest challenge to all BI decision-support projects is the quality of the source data. Bad habits developed over decades are difficult to break, and the damages resulting from bad habits are very expensive, time consuming, and tedious to find and correct. In addition, data analysis in the past was confined to the view of one line of business and was never consolidated or reconciled with other views in the organization. This step takes a significant percentage of the time allotted to the entire project schedule.

Step 6: Application Prototyping

Analysis of the functional deliverables, which used to be called system analysis, is best done through prototyping so it can be combined with application design. New tools and programming languages enable developers to relatively quickly prove or disprove a concept or an idea. Prototyping also allows business people to see the potential and the limits of the technology, which gives them an opportunity to adjust their project requirements and their expectations.