This document discusses best practices for productionalizing business intelligence (BI). It recommends thoroughly understanding business needs before choosing a BI software. Key aspects of BI productionalization include defining key performance indicators, ensuring proper data delivery, using source control, providing narrative requirements over storyboards, and monitoring performance across systems. The challenges of BI involve socializing the tools to gain support, integrating with other systems, and understanding that BI requires an ongoing, collaborative process beyond a single implementation.

1. BusinessIntelligenceProductionalization
AnEffectiveStrategycanProvideaCompetitiveMarketAdvantage
2015Flipside-Media:WhitePaper
byDavidT.MooreTIBCOSOAArchitect&BusinessIntelligence
Created by David T. Moore TIBCO SOA Architect & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Spotfire 1< <m/d>>

2. Business Intelligence Productionalization
Key Performance Indicators (KPI)
Importance of Data Delivery
Source Control
Best Practice to provide document requirements (Narrative vs Storyboards)
Performance Monitoring
Created by David T. Moore TIBCO SOA Architect & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Spotfire 2< <m/d>>
What is Agile Business Intelligene
(BI)? LIfecycle Overview
How to choose the right business intellgence software?
What is productionalizing Business Intelligence (BI)?
Common Challenges:
The Biggest Risk of All is Never Taking Any Risk at All

3. Created by David T. Moore TIBCO SOA Architect & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Spotfire 3< <m/d>>
Business Intelligence Productionalization
What is Agile Business Intelligence?
Agile Business Intelligence (BI) is a development methodology for business intelligence projects. Agile BI allows for
competitive market place deliverables and allows for prompt adaptation to the ever changing business needs. A
continual process that is beyond a one time implementation that empowers better business decisions based on
iterative principles is the core strength behind Agile Business Intelligence (BI) by getting the right data at the right
time.
Agile BI promotes collaboration across the enterprise connecting business and technical resources. A positive
adaptive theory approach to BI functionality focuses on delivering manageable chunks, or pieces with short term
deliverable cycles integrated with an iterative "living" documentation cycle. Agile BI promotes adaptive planning,
evolutionary and iterative development and delivery cycles. With a rapid and flexible response to the ever changing
business and competitive market place, Agile Business Intelligence (BI) optimized Total Cost of Change (TCC) by
getting the right data at the right time.
"Forrester Research defines agile BI as an approach that combines processes, methodologies, tools and
technologies, while incorporating organizational structure, in order to help strategic, tactical and operational
decision-makers be more flexible and more responsive to ever-changing business and regulatory requirements".
According to the research by the Aberdeen Group, organizations with the most highly agile BI implementations are
more likely to have processes in place for ensuring that business needs are being met. Success of Agile BI
implementation also heavily depends on the end user participation and "frequent collaboration between IT and the
business".

4. Created by David T. Moore TIBCO SOA Architect & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Spotfire 4< <m/d>>
Business Intelligence Productionalization
How to choose the right Business Intelligence (BI) software?
Deciphering the best solution for business intelligence requires homework.
First, a thorough evaluation of the business challenge, or challenges to be addressed should be
identified. Lack of patience and jumping into a quick panacea is a recipe for costly failure. Diligent
assessment of the business challenge and understanding that there is not an all encompassing magic
bullet solution is vital for success.
Second, socialize the business intelligence tool to the business and technology communities to be
involved. Listen to the community and provide stimulation to invoke zeal to accept the business
intelligence tool of choice by presenting benefits. Failure to obtain support, or buy-in, will create lack
of motivation and lack of integrity which promotes a charismatic recipe for additional failure. Don't
underestimate the magnitude of promoting change to the corporate culture. Educate, promote and
lead by example are socializing attributes for gaining community support which is applicable to more
than just business intelligence.
Third, the business intelligence solution must support and align in accordance with data governance,
security policies and legal obligations.
Fourth,the business intelligence solution must integrate with other business systems, applications,
portals and delivery platforms where applicable to support business initiatives.
Fifth, plan the business intelligence development, testing, deployment and education processes with
patience and definition. Socialize the business intelligence life cycle and work flows to reinforce Agile
BI. Avoid failing to plan and becoming part of the crowd that believes iteratively walking into a cube
and throwing notes at a developer is Agile.
Sixth, define a collaborative approach to sharing the data across the enterprise. Sharing data is
valuable for addressing different data points, forecasting and identifying risks in an ever changing
business environment.
Seventh, advocate a visionary approach to "rail road" the community in support of a seamless and
profitable experience. Considerations may include business intelligence cloud, extending the platform
with custom visualizations, automated delivery, training programs and more.
Eighth, understand that this document is not exhaustive.
Business Intelligence is a continual process that is
beyond a one time implementation

5. Created by David T. Moore TIBCO SOA Architect & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Spotfire 5< <m/d>>
Business Intelligence Productionalization
What is productionalizing Business Intelligence (BI)?
Productionalizing Business Intelligence (BI) is the process of mass producing
dashboards and reports for predictive analytical decisions. It requires an
integration of business intelligence development life cycle that expands
beyond standing up a BI software solution. A custom solutions based on
"needs analysis" should include an iterative documentation cycle, process
workflows, alignment with enterprise architecture, adherence to security and
legal requirements plus a continuous "Research & Development" process to
seamlessly lead corporate culture to success. Human centric.

6. Created by David T. Moore TIBCO SOA Architect & Business Intelligence Infrastructure Spotfire 6< <m/d>>
Business Intelligence Productionalization
Common Challenges
Key Performance Indicator (KPI)
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) help analyze the definition of success and provides information to
invoke a plan of action. This requires a thorough evaluation of the current state and future state
of the business. A simple, objective and feasible set of performance indicators is essential.
Selecting applicable indicators to obtain objectives, milestones, is paramount to meeting performance
goals, which includes a method of monitoring the data. Success.
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and Business Intelligence systems provide organizations a method
to achieve a much higher level of success. For example, the clinical research life cycle is an
expensive
multi million revenue risk that historically could only monitored periodically over a five to seven year
duration Today, with the advent of real-time business intelligence systems, such as TIBCO Spotfire,
the process can be monitored more frequently optimizing the return on investment. Other industries
capitalizing on business intelligence and key performance approaches include Oil & Gas,
Pharmaceutical, Anti-Money Laundering & Terrorism (AML), Banking & Finance to name a few.
Importance of Data Delivery
.
Understanding back-end data and data management is essential to business intelligence deliverables.
Most executives interact with reports and dashboards transparent to back-end data and data
management. Since the ability to deliver information as a "self-serve" model freeing up the traditional
information technology resources is increasing in corporate culture, the solution is still about data and
data infrastructure. The challenge is delivering interactive business intelligent solutions in a fast pace
predictive forecasting model with clarity and peace of mind. Bottom-line, business intelligence
deliverables are a collaborative effort that requires everyone from the executives and business
stakeholders, networking and systems administration, application and enterprise architects, analysts
and developers, and so much more, to work together for a greater successful initiative.
Success starts by Planning and Avoiding the crowd that believes iteratively
walking into a cube and throwing notes at a developer is Agile.

7. Business Intelligence Productionalization
Common Challenges
Source Control
Source control systems provide many benefits. A source control system allows for automatic backups,
sharing on multiple computers for collaboration and appending notes, for example. Source control
manages the risk of disaster recovery that requires rebuilding a project and reduces costs and increases
delivery to the market place. Many business intelligent environments overlook the integration of a valuable
source control system.
Best Practice to provide document requirements (Narrative vs Storyboards)
Business Intelligence is about data. Providing interactive documentation requirements for business
intelligence dashboards must include narrative understanding of the core data and expectations.
Storyboards are about interfaces, navigation and pictures. Dashboards are about data. Avoid
approaching business intelligence projects like a website using storyboards.
Performance Monitoring
Business Intelligence performance monitoring is a collaborative effort across OSI layers. A cross-domain
view of operations provides a wider gaze and systemic view that traditionally had silos of systems and
applications. Performance monitoring includes networks, databases, applications and so much more.
Therefore, next time a comparison of a complex BI system to a simple spreadsheet application is
presented, learn to educate and be a leader with a swift ear, slow tongue and a big smile.
Know your data. Know your mission. Know your audience.