Maturing Business Intelligence Environments

Demand for software and services required to deliver Master Data Management (MDM), Information Quality Management (IQM), and Information Governance (IG) services continues to grow at double-digit rates, even in these challenging economic times. This is no surprise to those of us familiar with HP’s BI Maturity Model, which charts the adoption of business intelligence (BI) within an organization along a maturity curve.

The BI Maturity Model and its formula for success
The BI Maturity Model shows that successful BI is a function of three capabilities: business enablement, information technology, and strategy and program management. Organizations evolve through five stages along these three axes.  

The business enablement dimension describes the advancing nature of the types of business needs and problems that are solved with BI solutions.  The information technology dimension describes the advancing nature of the information solutions a company adopts to serve a variety of business needs. And the strategy and program management dimension describes the advancing nature of management skill as a key enabler and catalyst for BI success.

Stage 1-Running the business
In Stage 1, the emphasis is on basic reporting and spreadsheets that help run the business. Solutions are departmental and rarely integrated across the business.

Stage 2-Measuring and monitoring the business
In Stage 2, organizations expand reporting and implement dashboards and scorecards to help measure and monitor the business. Subject area repositories begin to proliferate, and project management skill becomes more important.

Stage 3-Alignment
Organizations in Stage 3 reach an important level of maturity as they begin to manage BI as a program, seeking integration across their BI investments as well as performance management initiatives. It is here we see the first MDM efforts, attention to data quality and the introduction of governance models.

Stage 4-Empowerment
Stage 4 organizations begin to foster innovation through their use of BI and will put in place the tools, organizations, and processes to promote worker productivity.  Ability to use information becomes an empowering factor.

Stage 5-Transformation
In Stage 5, organizations differentiate the business through highly integrated and synthesized information and intelligence.  Organizations at this stage are the true power users of information and will use it to drive innovations and strategic agility for their businesses.

Bumps in the road on the BI journey
The HP BI Maturity Model shows that as use of BI expands and organizations move into Stage 3, they want to integrate their BI assets and manage them with a larger view of the business, an enterprise view. But often, organizations are hindered in their ability to advance forward because they have too many information silos, they can't trust the quality of their data, they don't have common definitions of key reference data that would enable them to look across business units, and they lack the governance models that would enable them to manage their information as a program. 

Enterprise data management problems fall into four categories.  

Poor data quality
"I can't trust my data" is a common complaint. Data is inaccurate, inconsistent, or incomplete; there are too many versions of the truth.  The cost and lost opportunity associated with this dirty data is staggering.  What is the impact when a customer service agent has to spend several extra seconds on every call validating he has the right customer record? How about the direct marketer who wastes millions on postage and collateral costs because of duplicate mailings and undeliverable mail? What is the damage to the brand when the customer continues to receive offers for products she already has purchased from the organization?   

Inability to realize an enterprise view
"I need to view information across business units and globally." Organizations want to look across business units at the whole information chain, for example, to understand the complete customer relationship.  The problem is that they have hundreds, maybe thousands, of information silos.  Across those silos, they have no common definitions of fundamentals in their businesses-what is a customer, product, location, supplier?  They can't look across business units, much less globally, to understand their business operations.  

Drive for information management efficiency
"I need to eliminate redundancy and take cost out of operations." As BI tools and repositories expand across the organization, redundant systems and processes proliferate. In addition, poor information management hobbles functional processes like procurement or customer relationship management.  Can the organization determine where they buy the most goods? Are they leveraging their largest suppliers?  Can they determine the full scope of interaction with customers? Are they missing opportunities to identify new products or cross-sell and upsell services and products that could improve satisfaction and loyalty?

Managing risk and compliance
"I need a complete view of my information relationships."  Clear data lineage and auditability of information is a requirement to simplify legal discovery and meet demands in a heightened regulatory environment.  Can the organization determine where data originated? How was it derived? Who touched it and how was it changed since its inception? Is it accurate? If executives break a sweat before signing on the dotted line, then good information quality is much needed to provide the necessary data lineage. 

Using MDM, IQM and IG as enablers on the BI journey
Because organizations lack confidence in their data and can't look across the whole information value chain, enterprise data management compromises an organization's ability to make decisions, understand and serve its customers, make the right investments, and manage risk. As a result, organizations can't really derive the value they should from the considerable investments they've made in their CRM, BI, and ERP applications. 

That's where the bump in the road at Stage 3 of the BI Maturity Model becomes a roadblock, a wall that organizations need to scale in order to move on.  HP's 2009 Top Ten Trends in Business Intelligence analysis cites data integration as a growing focus area for organizations with first-generation data infrastructures that cannot support second-generation BI environments.  In other words, we will see more concern and more need going forward for disciplines that help organizations continue to evolve beyond the current state.

MDM, Information Quality Management, and Information Governance as enablers of strong enterprise data management
Enter MDM, Information Quality, and Information Governance. These strategic information domains address an important part of the underlying problem: an inadequate data infrastructure that has evolved over time and without the necessary rigor to support an evolving and maturing BI environment.  MDM, IQM, and IG address fundamental enterprise data management problems head-on.  Let's define each of these disciplines:

Master Data Management
Master data is the information that describes core business entities such as customers, products, locations, or suppliers.  It is typically nontransactional data, shared by several applications, and static in nature. Master Data Management, then, is the development and maintenance of the required organizations, processes and tools to ensure that every master data element is 1) captured once, on time, accurately, completely, correctly and consistently, thus enabling master data quality; 2) stored in a way that guarantees integrity and a single place of reference; and 3) made available to those who need it, whenever they need it, both internally and externally.

Information Quality Management
IQM is a program for managing data quality by instantiating accountability and responsibility for data (stewardship) and by installing tools, processes and metadata to define, monitor and measure quality. At HP, it comprises three interrelated components: 1) data governance and stewardship model; 2) a data quality controls framework; and 3) a metadata repository. As an agent of change, an IQM program realigns the concept of data ownership, removes data as an impediment to change and innovation, and breaks down the "data fortresses" between business units.

Information Governance
Information Governance includes the processes, policies, standards, organization, and technologies required to manage and ensure the availability, accessibility, quality, consistency, auditability, and security of information in an organization. Its goals are to ensure data meets the needs of the business, protect and develop data as a valued enterprise asset, and lower the cost of managing data.

MDM, IQM, and IG are enablers on this BI journey, and we view them as interrelated disciplines that help organizations realize the full value of their BI investments.  BI is about enhanced decision making, improved insight, reduced risk and cost efficiency.  They provide the reliable, accurate source of data for making better decisions, enabling the enterprise view for a complete view of relationships, reducing risk through improved data integrity and governance, and introducing efficiency by eliminating redundant systems and processes.  MDM, IQM, and IG make the data work for the business.

Once past these enterprise data management limitations, an organization is poised to become a business that is empowered by its information and harnessing the potential to really transform the business.  That's Stage 4 of the BI Maturity Model, where organizations operationalize their BI as a mission-critical application and a driver of strategic agility.

At HP, we take a holistic view of MDM, IQM, and IG, integrating strategy and implementation methodologies across the three disciplines to recognize their interdependency.  We pair that with deep data integration and warehousing credentials to help organizations execute the most complex data strategy.  And finally, we offer an unbiased tool selection process for MDM, IQM, IG and data integration tools that is driven by customer needs.  We're there to help organizations get past the roadblocks on that bumpy BI evolutionary road and realize the full value of the BI investment.

>> Listen to an introductory podcast about the HP BI Maturity Model - http://www.b-eye-network.com/listen/6941

>> Take an online business intelligence maturity model assessment - https://h30406.www3.hp.com/campaigns/2007/promo/1-3NKTV/index.php?mcc=CRKM&jumpid=ex_r2548_go/assessBInow/kimesg/4Q07BusinessIntelligenceTool/1-3NKTV/0907/DM-Ivan_mcc|CRKM

>> Read more about the HP Business Intelligence Maturity Model - http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA1-5467ENW

>> Discover the Top 10 BI trends for 2009-- http://www.hp.com/go/bi

Contact details:
Steven Deloye
Customer Success Manager
T: +1 949 2188251
E: steven.deloye@hp.com
www.hp.com/go/bi