Alineamiento Bi

Aligning BI with business strategy: How a Mission Mapped Architecture can help

Knightsbridge Solutions LLC White Paper Aligning BI with business strategy: How a Mission Mapped Architecture can help Page 2

Table of contents
Introduction Gathering initial requirements Writing your BI program mission statement Creating a set of strategic objectives Generating strategic measures Generatingand validating your requirements Creating BI architecture criteria Mapping, gapping, and validating Conclusion and next steps 3 4 4 6 6 8 9 9 10

Knightsbridge Solutions LLC White Paper Aligning BI with business strategy: How a Mission Mapped Architecture can help Page 3

Aligning BI with business strategy: How a Mission Mapped Architecture can help
Introduction A recent survey conducted byThe Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) found that successful business intelligence initiatives are almost five times more likely to have project teams in which IT is “very aligned” with the business. TDWI defines successful BI initiatives as those that support critical business processes, are seen by users as mission critical, and are meeting users’ needs. While all organizations begin their BIinitiatives with the expectation of success, many struggle to align their technology approach to BI with specific business goals and objectives and as a result, deliver solutions that fail to meet business needs. Although most BI professionals would agree that an “If you build it, they will come” approach is likely to fail, organizational and political realities often prevent BI efforts from beingfully aligned with the business. Do any of the following scenarios describe your organization? • In an effort to anticipate users’ needs, IT has begun to invest in BI technologies without business sponsorship and involvement. • Business units and departments are building their own BI infrastructures because of a poor relationship with IT. • IT believes the business doesn’t understand theimportance of BI and isn’t in a position to articulate requirements, so it’s up to IT to provide the right solution. • A powerful executive is excited about the promise of BI technology and pushes to go ahead with or without business/IT alignment. It can be difficult to get around these organizational and political issues to open up the lines of communication between business and IT. And even if businessand IT have a great relationship in your organization, you might need a more structured approach for helping promote a common understanding around the alignment of business goals and objectives for BI with the technology investments being made to support them. That’s where a Mission Mapped Architecture (MMA) comes in. A subset of a broader business alignment methodology based on mission andstrategy mapping, the approach melds business strategy mapping with information management strategy generation to provide a continuous alignment process. Mission Mapped Architecture is focused on data and related architectural requirements of BI programs. Its output informs and guides the design process used by the BI program to reflect and satisfy business imperatives.

Knightsbridge SolutionsLLC White Paper Aligning BI with business strategy: How a Mission Mapped Architecture can help Page 4

An MMA is developed through a “step-down” process that creates specific linkages between a high-level set of business needs for information and the technical architecture designed to support those needs. The linkage is achieved by “stepping down” from a high-level, business-driven missionstatement to a set of more specific business and IT objectives, then to a set of specific implementation criteria, and finally to the conceptual design of a long-term technical architecture for an improved BI program. Each step in the process is linked to its predecessor and validated by both the business and IT communities, ensuring that the initial mission is supported. This method of architectural...