Made to last

How can a pharmaceutical company enable the success of its business Intelligence program, and then ensure its ongoing success? As Greg Hatfield, Co-Founder and President of Bi3 Solutions, explains, there are many factors a company should consider when planning or executing a BI initiative, that are crucial to its initial and, more importantly continuing, success in the organization.

The pharmaceutical industry faces some particularly demanding challenges when it comes to its information capital management. Beyond the obvious data quantity and quality issues (vast amounts of data from a multitude of systems requiring timely and accurate integration), pharma companies also face the reality that they are in a rapid growth industry. Whether through organic growth or merger and acquisitions, this reality puts a tremendous burden on IT systems often already overwhelmed with the daily demands of maintaining operational systems and application integration. Regulatory compliance further adds to the burden and increases the demand for timely and accurate information from many areas of the organization. While the need for business intelligence or science intelligence is recognized, often the organizational structure and processes to achieve success are not.

Gartner has evangelized the need for a Business Intelligence Competency Center (BICC) in organizations striving for greater returns on their BI investments, and to ensure ongoing success of their BI programs. The BICC’s role is to champion the BI program and define standards, and to focus on business alignment, project prioritization, management and ensuring user adoption. Realistically though, many organizations struggle with the concept (and funding) of another, separate organization outside of the data warehousing or BI team that they have already invested in, and which may not be delivering desired or expected results to date. It becomes a question of the chicken or the egg - which comes first? If an organization has a successful BI program – meaning it is recognizing a return on its investment already, it is usually more willing to invest further, but where is the recognized need for a BICC then? If the same organization has had challenges with BI in the past, garnering support for the additional investment in a BICC will most likely be an exercise in futility.

So, what should companies, and especially pharmaceutical companies (with their inherent challenges), do if they are going to be able to proactively meet the demands for information required by the growing contingency of consumers – not just internally, but externally as well? The answer lies in addressing not only the organizational structure, including roles and responsibilities, but in also developing a framework of processes that can support multiple and sometimes simultaneous incremental development threads. Such a concept must be attractive to IT, the business community and especially executive management.

The BIPC – A hybrid approach
Bi3 Solutions has successfully introduced what we call the Business Intelligence Performance Center (BIPC) into a number of organizations. The BIPC addresses the goals and objectives of the BICC, but more importantly, the specific roles, responsibilities, processes and deliverables required for repeatable and scalable BI success.

The BIPC can be subdivided into two categories – organizational and procedural. Here I focus primarily on the former components, which as each process step must be accountable by role are a prerequisite for developing the procedural components.

BIPC organization – roles and responsibilities
It is now common knowledge that BI programs are incremental in nature. The more information that is delivered to the user community, the higher the demand will be for additional subject areas, metrics, reports, cubes and even extensions such as balanced scorecards and executive dashboards. Many companies are taking further steps with corporate performance management initiatives that are inherently linked to the BI foundation and initiatives.

So, herein lays the problem. Once the first increment(s) are put into production, there are still significant resource allocations required to maintain those increments (issue management, ETL processing efficiency improvements, ongoing report and cube development, field and table enhancements, business rule changes, etc.). This ongoing, day-to-day operational aspect of a business intelligence solution requires an operational team that is responsible for ensuring high service levels to the user community. Many companies underestimate this responsibility and try to use the same resources for operations as for new requirements gathering and assessment, and even new development. It usually doesn’t work. In fact, taking this approach endangers all aspects of the program, often resulting in a fire-fighting environment in which the ‘clients’ or end users become dissatisfied. Ultimately, this leads to the abandonment of the BI solution in favor of other alternatives in which they feel they have more input and are more comfortable with.

The BIPC addresses all these issues through the clear delineation of roles and responsibilities, and in general has these five core components supported by business subject matter experts:

Steering committee
Although it should be obvious, it needs to be stressed that the steering committee must consist of executive level members from the business community in addition to representation from IT. This committee is responsible for ensuring the strategic alignment and direction of the BI program in addition to providing executive sponsorship, prioritization and funding.

BIPC manager
The BIPC manager’s role is critical to the success of a BI program in any company. The BIPC manager must not only be very experienced in the best practices and lifecycle of Business Intelligence, but must also have specific industry understanding and knowledge. This business aspect to the role is crucial to the role’s acceptance as a peer and respected figure by the user community. The BIPC manager must be capable of representing the BI program effectively at any level in the organization and acts as a liaison and advocate to the business community.

They are also responsible not only for the continuous organizational development of the BIPC teams, but for developing and maintaining a strategically aligned BI vision along with a supporting architecture, procedures and the collaboration and communication mechanisms necessary for ongoing success.

Strategy team
This is the team of evangelists and experts, the core of the BIPC; the team that is most closely associated with the ‘clients’ or end users, understands all the different technologies and aspects of business intelligence, and can plan and educate others. It is the responsibility of this team to determine requirements for future increments, to prioritize those requirements, and to develop an ongoing roadmap for improvement of the BI program. The strategy team takes on the responsibility of meeting with the end-users, defining requirements, defining cost/benefits and ROI models, and making recommendations to the decision makers on prioritization, design and processes.

Skill sets for this team differ dramatically from those in the operational or developmental roles. These are business intelligence analysts, strategists and project managers. They know the business, and the users. They know how to translate business requirements into technical specifications. They also know the transactional systems and how they are being used from a business perspective. Data and process modeling is important in this team. So is documentation and project management. In essence, the strategy team drives the work done by the development team.

Development team
This team is responsible for delivering new functionality and subject areas to the business community. They are not responsible for ongoing operations or strategy. Their job is to execute on the roadmap and increments defined by the strategy team, or to make modifications as defined by the operations team for future releases. This is where the data mart/data warehouse development work takes place and where the ETL coding gets done. This team produces new reports and cubes that are specified for each incremental phase.

The development team also has testing and QA responsibilities. It is not sufficient to develop and expect the end users to test, so this team must undertake its own rigorous testing before end user testing is even considered. In general, there are two types of resources on this team: the back office (database, ETL) and the front office (presentation of reports, cubes, etc, security, metadata delivery).

Operations team
Monitoring of the BI solution is often overlooked. The operational team needs to put in place processes to ensure that extraction, transformation and load (ETL) processes run smoothly each and every time and, when there are issues, that a notification system is in place for both the operational team and any affected end users. Beyond ETL, the team needs to monitor reports, cube builds, usage, aggregate requirements, indexing requirements, backup and rollback procedures. They need to work closely with the development team in monitoring any new releases to ensure that they go smoothly, and that adequate testing has been completed (including testing other areas that may be affected by the new release).

Maintaining the production environment and supporting the users with an efficient and knowledgeable help desk is just as important. New product releases need to be tested prior to being put into production. With the number of different tools required in a solution, releases may be frequent. And, change happens. New business rules or modification of existing business rules will result in changes to ETL and possibly even to database structures and reports. Source systems are modified. The operational team needs to be informed of these changes before they happen so they can work with the development team in ensuring that the existing production modules are modified accordingly.

Starting down the BI path
Ideally, companies will begin the process of developing their Business Intelligence Performance Center before undertaking a BI initiative. However, for many companies, the reality is that the requirement for a BIPC does not become readily apparent until after they have started down the BI path. Regardless of when a company recognizes the need for a BIPC, the general steps to be taken remain fairly constant. Bi3 Solutions offers guidance, facilitation, support, a proven framework deployable in a web-based collaborative engine and the experienced consultants to help our clients build and maintain their Business Intelligence Performance Centers.