Enabling a Business Intelligence Self Service Platform across the Enterprise

Filed under: , by: Art Style and Design

One of the favorite strategies to promote the use of the platform is to focus on specific initiatives, measuring before and after, and if possible have the champion of the initiative give a lunch & learn to the user community; reporting first hand the positive impact the platform has had in her/his business. (e.g. a deli Vice-President decided to measure the sales of rotisserie chickens, she found that the stores were not making them as they did not know how many to produce at a particular time, after running a couple of reports on sales by hour she was able to put together some guidelines as to how many chickens and when to cook them. The results were amazing, sales went up by 5,000% in one week, the store associates were impressed by the knowledge the VP had shown about the business, and their specific store). The rotisserie chickens story became an urban legend within the company, inspiring, and energizing people to match the deli success in their department.

There is no more powerful way to measure results than in old, plain dollars, if possible try to quantify the benefits in hard dollars. This way everybody across the Enterprise understands the scale, and there will no doubt about the Return On Investment of the initiative.

Summary

Implementing a Self Service Business Intelligence platform in the Enterprise is not a simple task. It requires aligning People, Technology and Process to a Business vision that needs to be strong enough to bridge the gaps among different departments and have them collaborate single mindedly. However the benefits of undertaking such as effort can be substantial and can positively influence the performance of everyone in the organization.

About the Author

Noe A. Gutierrez is a veteran in the Business Intelligence industry. He joined Microstrategy in April 1998 as an international associate. He occupied different leadership positions within Tech Support, Technology and Consulting. He left Microstrategy to lead the development team of pricedrive.com. He was invited by Microstrategy to lead the office in Northern Mexico where he grew the region into a multimillion dollar operation. He returned to the US to lead the development of HEB’s next generation Data Warehouse. Most recently Noe joined Infosys, where he has helped other organizations to fulfill the potential of their Data Warehouse.

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