Change Management in BI

The key success for a Global platform is to have strong governance. In order to produce strong governance in a big organization, a robust and effective process has to be in place. This include the deep understanding of a changes in business and technical that impact BI. One of the rule of thumb of change management in BI is changes in the target system won't impact the feed system but changes in the source system might impact the target system. For example: COPA realignment is done inR/3 which changes the historical master data but BI must reinitialize the delta. New characteristics are created under a new class for new/existing material group. In order to report on the new attributes , BI needs to regenerate its material classification datasource in R/3. A criteria needed to ensure successful change management is the ability to understand the root cause of the issues technically and functionally and address its risk and effort level accurately. Knowing how to identify and fill the gaps between in-source responsibility with outsource capability is equivalently important to drive an efficient BAU process and avoid redundant processes to take place.

The objective of a change process is to ensure there is a standard and control for changes that lands into the system in order to mitigate risk of defects and impacts. But the control must be flexible enough to hold different type of scenarios that range from project mode, project into bau transitioning mode, shadow support mode,post go live, warranty fix mode,technical go live, business go live and etc. Eg. during warranty period or post go live mode, it is impossible to demand for a CR for each fixes as it is not uncommon at all to spot handful of bugs and breaks in those period. At some cases, when project and demand IT team are not in agreement of the project release timeline, there will be a release for technical go live and only when there adoption of the BI reports by business users, the project is moved to the business release go live stage. Such scenario is very complex to handle in bau management and project resource management, especially the technical warranty period is lapsed but more issues were encountered during business go live. At such, the process of change management should be flexible enough to apply different level of control at different stage.