Friday, May 28, 2010

ITIL in BI

When I attended the ITIL Foundation V3, the first question I asked was how practical is ITIL in practise for Business Intelligence in a corporate organization.

In my opinion, in BI we can first zoom into these 3 areas - Change Management, Problem Management and Project Delivery. When we start to identify the essence of these areas, we are nominating ownership for each employee in the division. Without a sense of ownership, an organization may end up creating an unhealthy culture whether there will be one or two 'star employee' who holds all the important information without needing to share any of it to the peers or everyone is doing everything in a messy way based on adhoc instructions. 

What makes me want to look into these 3 areas are based on some idealogy as below. 

Change is the only thing that is constant. Hence change is our business as usual. BI change management has to take place in parallel with the business change. The execution of change management in BI is the result of impact asessment and this exercise take place at 2 main trigger points: 

1) when there is a new initiative. This can be:
- new products or service line
- groupwide consolidation
- new kpi or division

2) when there is a change in core functions. This can be:
- restructuring of organization
- change in service line and product offerings
- change in business operations

A good system and design has to take account into potential changes. Project Delivery should also take into the account of balancing the deliverables on time based on current requirements and scopes as well as to include the requirement and effort required to ensure system scalability in terms of business change. A smart angle to control the project from budget and business needs perspectives are to manage the later point through new phases or enhancement.

Problem is the only thing we see things we fail to see at the initial stage.In BI problem management or commonly known as Support, it is the execution of the result of root cause analysis.Root cause analysis reveals a lot about the reasons for data discrepencies or system flaws that goes all the way back to business requirements, data cleaniless, governance practices and best design practices.

Both of these fundamental ITIL procesess - Change Management and Problem Management tie back to the initial stage of the solution proposal stage in Project Delivery because from the root cause we can propose better solution based on lesson learnt and with impact asessment we see what need to take into account to avoid impacts on other areas such as data accuracy in reports or system downtime when there are new changes introduced. In a layman way of saying, Problem Management takes place after bad things had happened , Change Management takes place as a precaution measure before bad things happen.

Hence Project Delivery , Change Management and Problem Management are tightly coupled functions that need to co-exist and integrate well to ensure the success of any Analytical or BI operations in a large organization.


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