Basically, a Business Intelligence project has to deal with three major topics:

• Infrastructure
• Data
• Application

• Infrastructure includes all the tasks necessary to provide the technical basis for the Business Intelligence environment. This includes the installation and implementation of new hardware and software, the connectivity between the legacy environment and the new Business Intelligence environment on a network, as well as on a database level, and the implementation of a population subsystem, an administration subsystem, and a management subsystem. Establishing the infrastructure for the first Business Intelligence solution is time consuming, but with the selection of scalable hardware and software components, the effort will decrease dramatically for the next project or delivery cycle.

• Data deals with data access, mapping, derivation, transformation, and aggregation according to the requirements and business rules, as well as with the proper definition of the data items in business terms (metadata). It also contains the tasks necessary to ensure the consistency and quality of the information being transferred to the Business Intelligence environment. The effort for the tasks involved in the data topic should decrease with each new Business Intelligence project, depending on the amount of data that can be reused from previous projects (or iterations).

• Application includes the gathering of the business requirements, the design of the model, and the implementation, visualization, and publication of the analysis results in terms of, for example, queries,
reports, and charts. The effort needed for the tasks within the application topic is heavily dependent on the selected scope of the project.

The scope of a Business Intelligence project should be selected in such a way that a complete solution (that is, infrastructure, data, and application) for the business analysis domain selected can be offered and valuable results can be delivered to the business analysts within a reasonable timeframe (no longer than six months).

Posted on September 22nd, 2008 by Sanjay Mehta
Filed under: Business Intelligence

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