Reference no: EM132570942

Task 1 - Business Intelligence Framework

This assessment task requires you to develop a business intelligence framework for an organisation. The organisation may be an actual organisation or one that is a simulated business. Where a simulated business is utilized, the business profile will be provided by the Assessor. The business intelligence system to be implemented will, for the business and subject to its requirements, address implementation of a business intelligence system to perform a combination of functions including:

• analytics
• benchmarking
• business performance management
• data mining
• online analytical processing
• predictive analytics
• reporting
• text mining.

You will specifically need to:

• research and critically analyse the business intelligence requirements
• review, analyse and direct, business intelligence data manipulation
• review, critically analyse and endorse, the proposed business intelligence solution architecture
• initiate and contrast the tests required for the intelligence framework, for final acceptance.

Basis for the developed Framework

The working definition of business intelligence for this assessment task is that Business Intelligence (BI) is a set decision support applications that deliver information used in operations such as forecasting, analytics, dashboards, querying, reporting and data mining.

However, a major part of the success of a business intelligence program is the approach or methodology used to implement the framework and the related components. For example, if the approach used is one that simply constructs a data mart to support a specific set of business functions with no consideration for the organization strategic direction, scalability or maintainability, this business intelligence solution will certainly become a prime candidate for an expensive re-engineering project once those same business functions outgrow the application.

Now having said all of this, let's take a look at how incorporating key activities in the Software Development Life Cycle and the use of an architectural framework can implement business

intelligence programs that are scalable, maintainable and is aligned with the enterprise strategic direction--and of course, with documentation playing an integral part of the approach. Each phase should produce documentation that is used as a method to obtain signed approval to end one phase and begin the next. This practice should be integrated into your approach to this assessment task.

Initial Assessment

One of the most important activities is conducting an initial assessment. This assessment has two components to it; business and IT. The purpose of the assessment is to identify the business needs and the impact that a business intelligence solution would have on the organization. It is an effective way to identify the amount of time, cost and risk to the organization. It also provides the justification for business intelligence. This is a huge plus as it enables continued executive sponsorship.

The IT assessment is a complete evaluation of the current infrastructure. This answers the question "Does our organization have the tools and infrastructure to facilitate a BI solution?" The answer is in the results of a readiness assessment of the organization's ability to support a business intelligence framework and the related applications and solutions. The readiness assessment should include a detailed review of the hardware, BI and database software and operating system.

With this information, the team has everything it needs to produce a high level conceptual design of the BI architectural framework and an executive summary of the assessment.

These artifacts are the important business and IT drivers for the remaining activities in the SDLC. Where a simulated business is utilised for this assessment task, your Assessor will nominate a range of roles as required for stakeholder consultation.

Planning

Planning is the next set of activities that puts the BI framework in place that really and truly, puts everything in motion.

It is within this phase that the scope is clearly defined into sufficient detail that sets the expectations of senior management and in essence gets all members of the team to a common understanding of the goals of the project.

Once the scope has been defined and accepted by all members of the team complete with signed approvals, the next step is to define roles and responsibilities needed to complete the BI project. These roles and responsibilities should include both business and IT. It is very important that these roles are defined such that all is taken into account from a budget and time perspective. This task also facilitates the communication protocols for everything from

project status reporting to incident management. These roles should include but are not limited to business stakeholders and sponsors, business SMEs, business analysts, architects, DBAs, infrastructure engineers, ETL developers, BI developers (should be specific to the software solution such as COGNOS, SQL Server SSAS, Business Objects, etc) and project managers.

Also, in the planning stage, depending on the level of BI maturity in the organization, a training assessment should be conducted to gain an understanding of whether training is required for the BI suite of tools being deployed into the organization. This assessment has direct impact on cost and time lines as well.

The end results of the planning phase should be a fully fleshed out project plan with assigned responsibilities and time lines with alignments to the detailed budget for the project.

Requirements Gathering

With the project plan and budget approved, the functional and non-functional requirements are defined. The functional requirements are the articulated business needs that must be met with this BI solution. It is within these work sessions that requirements related to various types of reporting (ad-hoc and canned), the need for dashboards, key performance indexes (KPIs) and presentation displays are gathered and documented. Metadata management activities are a part of the requirements gathering process as it relates to the business context definitions of data. Also included in the requirements gathering from a business perspective is identifying the data sources that will be used to populate the data mart that will be the supporting data layer for the BI solution (in most cases). Ideally, the identification of these data sources should mainly be contained in the Data Warehouse. This is an important component. Why? Because if the data for the BI solution is sourced from the Data Warehouse, there is a high level of confidence in the quality of the data and minimal use of an ETL solution. If, however the data sources are disparate then the opposite holds true.

Non-functional requirements includes gathering information related to security, an essential and integral part of the BI solution. It is extremely important that the information being delivered is being consumed by authorized users only. Remember, each and every solution/application within the organization must survive an internal or external audit. Think Sarbanes-Oxley and HIPAA.

Other non-functional requirements include the definition of infrastructure needs as it relates to hardware, software and network components. These requirements should address the needs of a BI solution in terms of server memory configuration, use of SAN/NAS for storage, number of CPUs per server and parallel processing capabilities.

Once all this information and data has been compiled, a business requirements document is produced that frames the context of the business and IT requirements related to the BI solution that are in scope of the project.

Attachment:- Business Intelligence Framework.rar